Tagged with 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.

Want to have your say on sustainability?

Submit your proposal to present at the 2019 National Sustainability Conference, held at Hotel Grand Chancellor Brisbane on Monday 1 – Tuesday 2 April 2019.

Find out more here.

Why Australia imports so many veggie seeds (and do we really need to treat them with fungicides?)

Organic farmers have reacted with alarm to a draft review released last week that recommends mandatory fungicide treatment for certain plant seeds imported into Australia, including broccoli, cauliflower, radish and spinach.

Over 19,000 people have signed a change.org petition objecting to the proposal, which is designed to strengthen biosecurity for plants of the brassicaceae family. Opponents say mandatory fungicide treatment could spell the loss of organic accreditation for organic vegetable growers who rely on imported seed.

Why do we need to import seeds?

Australia’s vegetable growers do rely heavily on imported seed. But why?

The answer lies partly in where plant breeding expertise and effort is centred globally. Continuous (and often long-term) efforts in breeding have lead to the development of plant varieties with benefits like improved yield or quality, tolerance to stress and resistance to disease. These varieties have major advantages for growers (provided they are suitable for Australian conditions).

The global vegetable seed market is dominated by a small number of multinational companies. These international companies produce seeds in multiple locations around the world to reduce the risk of running low on popular varieties, and to benefit from the counter seasons of the northern and southern hemispheres.

However, seed grading, testing and treatment (including fungicide coating) is generally centrally coordinated at the company’s key global facility. These facilities are typically in close proximity to major vegetable growing regions, and thus outside Australia.

There are several companies distributing or producing vegetable seed in Australia, however most are owned by foreign parent companies and the breeding is done by them off-shore. In this case, subsidiary groups in Australia import the seed from the parent company, grow a crop for seed, and then may sell locally or return the seed to the parent company for quality control and global sale and distribution.

If seed were grown in Australia only for a domestic market, it would be a very small market without the benefits of an economy of scale. However, there are other benefits of breeding and growing crops for vegetable seed in Australia, including the scope to prioritise breeding efforts in response to local need. University of Sydney-based company Abundant Produce is addressing this gap for some vegetable crops, but not any brassicas as yet.

Can we protect biosecurity and organic farmers at the same time?

To address the dilemma faced by organic brassica growers who rely on imported seed, can the risk of diseases entering Australia be managed in organically acceptable ways?

In their draft review of the risk analysis for import of brassica seeds, the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources do clearly state that alternative measures will be considered if the “appropriate level of protection” can be achieved.

These alternatives may include importing seed from areas or production sites that are designated as free of the two pathogens of concern. A further alternative is seeds that have been grown using at least two independent and verified disease control measures (either pre- or post-harvest) as part of a “systems approach” to manage pest risk.

Non-fungicide seed treatments could also be considered. Heat, applied via steam, water or air, electrolysed water, or pulsed electric fields could be used, if they achieve the appropriate level of protection and seed viability is maintained. Organically-approved seed coatings and other treatments may also be an option.

But the efficiency of treatments depends on how the pathogen infects the host and in which part of the seed it is found.

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.