Posted in Farming

Strawberry Grower’s Despair Over Mass Dumping of Fruit Amid Demand for Extra Large Sizes

A Queensland strawberry grower has posted an emotional video to social media, despairing about throwing away drum loads of edible fruit because they do not meet retailers’ demand for extra-large berries as the season reaches its peak.

A spike in winter temperatures brought fields to peak production late last week.

In response, Coles dropped prices to as low as $1.00 per 250-gram punnet in New South Wales over the weekend to help suppliers move tonnes of excess produce.

Mandy Schultz was appalled by fruit waste on their farm so decided to freeze and freeze dry strawberries. (ABC Rural: Jennifer Nichols)

The glut may be great news for strawberry lovers, but growers are counting the cost.

On Friday, Wamuran grower Mandy Schultz received a phone call from a wholesale agent to say he was not accepting anything but extra-large strawberries.

She walked through her family’s packing shed that night, filming the trays of rejected sweet, small fruit that had been emptied into drums for disposal.

The dietitian launched her own waste-fighting program last year.

Titled LuvaBerry’s Our War on Waste, it saw Ms Schultz and her team freezing and freeze-drying excess fruit, that she then sold at scheduled meets in carparks.

But this time, on Friday, the freezers were already full.

“We are a farm that makes a really big effort with our waste, so what about the waste from the farms that don’t have anything in place?” Ms Schultz said.

Farm’s first open day helps address glut

On Sunday Ms Schultz welcomed more than 100 visitors to the farm’s first open day.

Families did their bit to eat excess fruit, picking assorted sizes of strawberries for $10 per kilogram.

Matt Garratt drove up from Brisbane to support the farm’s war on waste and expressed his surprise that size could be such an issue.

“I actually personally quite like small strawberries, I like them better than the large ones, so that’s a bit frustrating,” he said.

Price squeeze

Mandy’s husband Adrian Schultz is the vice-president of the Queensland Strawberry Growers Association and revealed that while production peaks are an annual event, gluts have been exacerbated by larger plantings.

Highly productive new varieties of strawberries that fruit earlier in the season have also impacted profits.

This article was originally published by ABC. Continue reading here.

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Organic agriculture is going mainstream, but not the way you think it is.

One of the biggest knocks against the organics movement is that it has begun to ape conventional agriculture, adopting the latter’s monocultures, reliance on purchased inputs and industrial processes.

“Big Organics” is often derided by advocates of sustainable agriculture. The American food authors Michael Pollan and Julie Guthman, for example, argue that as organic agriculture has scaled up and gone mainstream it has lost its commitment to building an alternative system for providing food, instead “replicating what it set out to oppose.”

New research, however, suggests that the relationship between organic and conventional farming is more complex. The flow of influence is starting to reverse course.

Practitioners of conventional agriculture are now borrowing “organic” techniques to reduce the use of pesticides, artificial fertilizers and excessive tillage, and to increase on-farm biodiversity, beneficial insects and soil conservation.

All of a sudden, many conventional vegetable farms are starting to look organic.

A tractor sprays pesticide on a field. (Shutterstock)

Organic goes mainstream

Next to nothing has been written on this subject. A rare exception is a 2016 article in the New York Times that profiled conventional farmers in Indiana who had started to use “cover crops.”

These non-commercial crops build organic matter into the soil, fix atmospheric nitrogen and add biodiversity to an agroecosystem, while allowing farmers to reduce artificial fertilizer inputs.

As organic agriculture has scaled up, it has gained credibility in the marketplace as well as on the farm. Organic farming has roots in market gardens and smaller farms, but there is nothing that prohibits organic production at larger scales.

That often means bigger farms, hundreds — or thousands — of acres in size.

This move toward the mainstream has caught the eye of many conventional farmers, who have either transitioned to certified organic production or begun to integrate organic practices on conventional plots.

Market share not the whole story

Even with the upscaling, the market position of organic agriculture remains limited.

In Canada, organic sales grow by nearly 10 per cent per year, and the total value of the organic market is around $5.4 billion. Yet the reality is that the industry is still dwarfed by conventional agriculture.

There are more than 4,000 certified organic farms in Canada, totalling 2.43 million acres. But this accounts for only 1.5 per cent of the country’s total agricultural land.

Also, aside from the two organic heavyweights — coffee (imported) and mixed greens (mostly imported) — the market share of organic groceries is pretty small, at around three per cent.

Yet the influence of organics is felt well beyond its own limited market.

Originally Published by The Conversation, continue reading here.

Australian Cotton ‘Pick of the Crop’ as More Global Consumers Demand Sustainable Fibres

Consumer desire for sustainably produced goods is driving domestic and global demand for Australia’s $2.5-billion cotton crop, according to retailers and millers.

Leading brands are now introducing clothing ranges made entirely from Australian cotton as an alternative to cheaper fibre mixes.

Photo: article supplied

“More and more international retailers and brand owners want to know the story about the production cycle,” Cotton Australia CEO Adam Kay told ABC News.

“They want to know about the sustainability and the environmental story,” he said, adding the industry had worked hard for years on winning a social license to operate.

“We can clearly demonstrate over 40 per cent improvement in water use efficiency over the last decade and we’ve reduced the amount of pesticide used by 90 per cent in the last 15 years.”

Mr Kay recently hosted a visit to the cotton fields of Narrabri, New South Wales, for designers and retailers from some of the biggest brands in the country.

“We’ve seen a huge increase in interest,” said Cotton Australia’s Brooke Summers, whose job is to sell the story of Australian cotton to the world.

“A couple of years ago we struggled to get even eight people on a plane out to a visit like this, and now we’ve got thirty people here today.”

For Lisa Hunter, who manages womenswear for Jeans West, the tour gave her a feel — quite literally — of the fibre in the field, as well as an insight into the ginning process and the research being carried out to continually improve the crop.

“[Environmental credentials are] incredibly important to our customers,” Ms Hunter said.

“So we’ve been working transparently trying to trace back the cotton to the region and to the farm.”

The jeans retailer will feature its first all-Australian cotton shirts this spring.

This article was originally published by ABC.net.au.

Click here to read the entire article.

Farmer working to make teff the next big thing in ancient grains

Ancient grains have found a place as part of the modern diet, with options like quinoa becoming common on supermarket shelves and cafe menus.

But a southern New South Wales farmer is hoping Australian consumers will develop a taste for another ancient grain: teff.

teff

Wakool farmer Fraser McNaul is growing the crop and working on a system to package and market the product from paddock to plate.

He said he believed consumers would be excited by the grain, if they could be informed about what it was.

“Teff is an ancient grain from Ethiopia, it’s gluten free and its main use over there is in injera bread,” he said.

“We want to develop some products out of it that are more in line with the western palate, so that’s what we are working on at the moment with our paddock to plate process under our own brand.

“We think it’s got great qualities to it, it’s very nutritious.

“The issue that we have to deal with the most is educating the public on what teff is to try and broaden the market for it and also compete with the really cheap imported teff.”

Mr McNaul said farmers are often price takers but he is aiming to gain control of his product and be the middle man.

He said teff had been difficult to grow, but he was hopeful the venture would be a success.

“I want to make farming more economically viable and be a price setter, not a price taker,” he said.

“It takes up a lot of time, every minute that I don’t have to be on the farm I spend in the office or in Melbourne trying to learn things and make contacts.

“We did a lot of trials and a lot of trial work over the last couple of years with different agronomy and sowing techniques.

Read more.

The dairy farmers committed to sustainability

It was a soil bacteria course in New Zealand that convinced Reggie Davis to change his farming methods.

The fourth-generation Victorian dairy farmer had become increasingly concerned by the costs, chemicals and time involved in the use of nitrate fertilisers to maintain – what was considered to be – high-quality pasture for his dairy herd.

So when his dairy herd nutritionist mentioned that the US biological farming advocate Dr Arden Andersen was running a soil management course in New Zealand, Davis decided to go. He asked around to see if any neighbours might be interested. Within weeks, 40 other dairy farmers from Victoria’s south-west had signed up for Andersen’s course.

That collegiate interest in investigating new farming methods is reflected in figures published by the Australian Dairy Industry Council in its annual sustainability performance review.

According to the 2015 report, 75% of Australia’s dairy farmers recycle water, 60% have sustainable farm management plans and 45% have invested in biodiversity management and conservation planning.

cows

Dairy farmers have also set a national target to reduce industry greenhouse emissions by 30% by 2020, and have already cut emissions by 15% – largely through energy audits of dairy machinery and farm equipment.

The report says dairy farmers want to create “a carbon-confident industry” and various software has been created to help to calculate and reduce farm emissions. These include the dairy climate toolkit and the dairy greenhouse abatement strategies calculator.

There are some industry leaders. Bega Cheese, one of Australia’s biggest dairy product manufacturers, launched a sustainability program in 2014, which led to a $50m investment in environmental initiatives. The company offers climate change adaptation advice for farmers, supporting programs to plant trees for shade and shelter.

Similarly Burra Foods, a dairy processor and exporter in Victoria’s south Gippsland region, has recovered 60m litres of water a year from the evaporating process used to produce powdered milk. It has also cut its town water consumption by 20% and expects to make a further 25% reduction by 2017.

There are dozens of similar stories across Australia’s dairy industry, which is the country’s third biggest rural industry after beef and wheat. It’s a $13.8bn industry that employs more than 39,000 people on farms and in manufacturing, and an additional 100,000 in related occupations such as dairy research and veterinary services. So if dairy takes a hard hit, regional economies will certainly feel it.

The current dairy crisis is taking its toll. In April the processing giants Murray Goulburn and Fonterra announced cuts to farmgate prices paid to dairy farmers for milk. Murray Goulburn announced the cuts would be retrospective, which meant famers will be forced to pay back about $200m over the next three years. For most farmers, that will average $300,000.

Both the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission are investigating Murray Goulburn but many farmers face financial ruin or the possibility of years of debt. It seems a particularly cruel blow for an industry in which the majority of farmers have been prepared to commit to sustainable farming practices.

Reggie Davis is a good example. One of the reasons he decided to take a closer look at biological farming methods was to avoid using chemical sprays to control pasture pests. He’d noticed the lush growth produced by nitrate fertilisers attracted insects such as red-legged earth mite.

These are a devastating pest, and controlling an infestation is costly. As well as the price of sprays, and possibly hiring a professional spray crew, farmers may have to buy supplementary fodder for their cows while the affected pasture is treated. The CSIRO estimates the mites, which were introduced from South Africa in the early 1900s, cost Australia’s farmers more than $500m a year in lost production.

The Davis family run 600 Friesian cows on their 570-hectare property near Camperdown in south-west Victoria. They’re one of five farming families in the region who have formed a group called the Green Pastures Movement to practice and promote sustainable farming.

The famers worked with a local company, Camperdown Compost, to set up a system of compost rows to turn straw, sawdust and cow manure into natural farm fertiliser. It’s a big operation that requires a heavy-duty mechanical compost turner, towed by a tractor, to periodically turn the compost windrows.

The Davis farm produces about 2,000 tonnes of compost each year, and this is applied to pasture in autumn at a rate of about one tonne to the acre (or half a hectare). “We’ve seen a lot of positive changes with our soil health and our cows,” Davis says. “And people tell us that our milk tastes better.”

Read more.