Rural

Gardening talkback with Peter Cundall

Peter is gardening morning, noon and night in these hot months.

If his seedlings of parsnip carrot and beetroot dry out he'll lose the bloomin' lot.

The best time to water is in the morning but seedlings need a drink several times a day.

Peter is also planting seedlings of leafy greens like cauliflower, brussel sprouts, cabbage, celery and broccoli but he warns NEVER plant in hot sun or they'll collapse.

He plants in the evening and fills each hole with water before putting them in.

He also collects fern stems to use as little sunshades for each plant and says it works brilliantly.

If you can keep the seedlings going through the summer you'll have a bounteous harvest in autumn and winter.

Good luck

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Terrifying ordeal for farmers caught in path of flames

 

By Sarina Locke

Just days before the fires struck Canberra in January 2003, rugged mountains were ablaze west of the capital. I was the 666 ABC Canberra rural reporter and I spoke to farmers at Tidbinbilla who thought, optimistically, their drought-stricken paddocks would be good fire breaks.

But out the back door was a weed-infested pine plantation and not too far away to the east, the southern suburbs of Canberra. Rising smoke during the night turned the moon pink and by daylight, the sun was red.

I drove out to meet Michael Shanahan at Tidbinbilla, whose property was going through the worst drought in 20 years. I remember Mr Shanahan's cheerful, crackly voice joking about the lack of grass to burn, but his face changed when he looked back at the copse of pine trees just 500 metres from his house. He was worried at the time and he was right. On the day the fire struck the fire crowned in the pine trees, burst out over his farm and raced over the dusty paddocks, burning even the dry roots of grass on its way to town.

It was a terrifying day for Michael Shanahan and his worker. It was all they could do to turn on the sprinklers on the roof of the 80-year-old woolshed. The worker then sheltered from the heat under a hose, but Mr Shanahan could see the danger approaching. Screaming for him to jump in the truck, they abandoned the running hose where the dogs were chained up and hoped for the best, driving to safer grounds - the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve car park. Mr Shanahan told me the truck was rocked by fire and winds for a whole hour and the only thing that saved them was the diesel engine on and air conditioner blasting.

Later, when they returned to the blackened ground near the woolshed, they were stunned to find the sheep dogs alive in the pool of water from the abandoned fire hose. Sadly, Mr Shanahan's nearest neighbour Robert Mack at Gibralter Creek lost his 100-year-old woolshed and cottage, but not his sense of community. For nights to come, he hosted many dinners for friends and firefighters by candlelight, with power still out.

Burning in the west Even after the fires burnt into Canberra, they continued to burn to the west, in the Mullion, Wee Jasper and around Burrinjuck Dam west of Yass. I was reporting from Queanbeyan RFS when I overheard of plans to fly over the fire ground. I jumped in the helicopter and saw for myself the fire's random path through the suburbs. Flying over bushland we saw injured kangaroos searching for water and shelter and we could smell and taste the smoky remains of paddocks and livestock.

Farmers who had already been in three years of drought, spent weeks fighting fires or mopping up on neighbours' properties. They would return home to feed stock, catch some rest and then back again to the fire ground. Local communication was extraordinary - the bush telegraph alive and well - controlled by the women on the phones and exhausted firefighters on fire radios.

Ten years on, we face similar conditions and I'm at RFS headquarters in Sydney. The air conditioning keeps us cool but still the commissioners are sweating as they move from one bright TV lighting to another, briefing the media on the efforts of volunteers.

At least so far there has not been one burnt house and no one killed. Can I guess it's from the lessons they've learnt from Canberra and Yass in 2003?

Paid less for harder work

 

by Sarina Locke

Grant Sherborne has suffered a pay cut, and yet his workday is longer and harder.

His family has a medium-size dairy near Moss Vale, an hour-and-a-half south of Sydney. Until last year, his milk went into Woolworths private label milk. But then Woolworths found a better deal and that supply was cut.

The result was his milk processor, Lion, didn't need as much and cut back 20 per cent of the litres it collects from NSW farmers from September last year.

Grant Sherborne says the family's income fell by $77,000 over the subsequent six months.

Cheap milk is stealing the market away from more expensive brand milk, and companies like the Japanese owned Lion (formerly National Foods) is scrambling to adjust to the new era.

"People go and buy $1-a-litre milk instead of buying a branded product. The less branded milk is sold, the lower the price comes back to us," says Mr Sherborne, up to his ankles this day in mud.

Dairying for farmers like Grant Sherborne got harder because with a pay cut the size of an average wage, he laid off a qualified worker and took on a series of backpackers, young locals and his long-suffering family.

The financial hit was swift for the Sherbornes - who lost income immediately after the decision, in Spring and Summer, when the milk was divided into a two tiered pricing system, and most of the milk fell into the lower price bracket.

Lion couldn't find a market for all the milk it collected so it paid the farmers less for tier-two milk, and sent it in tankers to Victoria so Murray Goulburn processors could dry it into milk powder.

ABC Rural predicted in August ((http://www.abc.net.au/rural/nsw/content/2011/08/s3293778.htm )) last year that tankers of milk would pass each other on the Hume Highway as Victorian milk, produced more cheaply heads north and excess NSW milk heads south.

It's a tough day in the paddock at the Moss Vale dairy. The agricultural adage of mud means money doesn't apply in country where the grass won't grow if it's too cold and wet. The cows' cloven hoofs get soft, cut by stones and afflicted by fungus. Mastitis bacteria thrive in udders that touch the ground. The cows stand on a mucky feed pad satisfied after a good ration of grain and hay, but miserable under cloud so low it sits on their backs.

Far away, six months before, in Canberra, a Senate Committee heard evidence that most dairies had not felt the impact of the retail milk price war.

Grant Sherborne is not alone thinking it was too early to tell, and the Inquiry should be reopened.

"Perhaps they done the Senate report too soon, at the time they did it which was within six months of when the $1-a-litre milk was brought in, we were still under contract so there was no effect until the end of June when the allocations were changed."

"Perhaps they need to do another inquiry!"

It's usually easy to get farmers to whinge either about the weather or prices. But it hasn't been altogether easy to get dairy farmers to moan on tape when they're still in price negotiations with processors and fear that speaking out will mean the contracts get cut, or they'll be singled out as difficult.

Lion is trying to be open, it says. It wants to talk about the future, but Lion is a company that was also caught out paying too much for the Australian company, Dairy Farmers at the peak of dairy prices.

Last year, the Japanese-owned company wrote down the business by $1 billion, and cut in operating profit in the dairy section. (Unsurprisingly, Lion's beers are doing better.)

So when quizzed about cutting loose a big dairy farmer in southern Queensland - who now has nowhere for his four million litre a year supply - Lion was unsympathetic.

"With investment in agriculture, sometimes you'll invest in the high end of an agricultural price. Now the price offered back in those times was record pricing, never seen in south-east Queensland before," Lion's director of milk procurement Murray Jeffrey.

 Lion has also cut free five dairy farms in Bodalla, on the NSW south coast, which are six long hours from milk drinkers in Sydney.

 Dairy farmers in NSW and Queensland are now pinning their hopes on Lion getting its restructure going - and developing yogurts in Victoria, flavoured milks in Sydney and cheese in Tasmania that capture better prices, and not heavy discounting from price conscious consumers.

Real power rests with fussy consumers

By Sarina Locke

It's becoming increasingly obvious; there are two streams of fruit and vegetable growers.

A  handful of 'captains' of industry, with lucrative contracts with the big two retailers, then the rest of Australia's farmers, struggling to remain viable producing food for wholesale markets and small farmers markets.

At the annual vegetable growers conference in Hobart, Ausveg, is John Said, joint owner of the large vegetable company Fresh Select, of Werribee Victoria.

Twenty years ago he fell upon an idea to supply fresh greens year-round to Coles.

On the farm, west of Melbourne, he uses irrigation, sometimes recycled water from Melbourne Water, to grow broccoli and lettuces of every hue.

What makes him a 'captain' is his ability to secure contracts with vegetable  growers from sunny Queensland to temperate Tasmania.

That way Coles deals directly with one company for key produce, bypassing the central markets.

The plan is so successful that John Said, his business partner and their two families generate $30 million turnover a year, from vegetables.

Direct marketing is a major shift that is threatening the power once held by the merchants and traders in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth.

But traders are wise to the shift.  Costa Exchange of Melbourne, which started in the 1880s as a fruit shop has since grown to be one of Australia's largest horticulture suppliers.

It has spent the last 20 years joining the dots - integrating everything from packing and trading, to exporting and now growing fruit and vegetables; bananas,  avocados, berries, citrus, grapes, mushrooms and tomatoes.

With backing from a US family company in 2004, it established the largest tomato greenhouses in the southern hemisphere with 20 hectares, at Guyra, in Northern NSW.

It's modelled on the massive expansion of glasshouse truss tomatoes seen in Mexico and southern USA.

Truss tomatoes, grown in glasshouses now sell for a premium over field grown tomatoes. Why?  Because consumers associate green stems and red fruit with flavour, and that's crucial since everyone believes flavour was sacrificed in the race to avoid tomatoes turning to passata on their way to market.

Although the company suffered from a glut of tomatoes during the first three months of the year, it's rebounding strongly and prices for truss tomatoes are  back up to $10 a kilo.

At the Ausveg conference Godfrey Dol, of Costa Exhange's tomato farm condemns field tomatoes, like those grown with irrigation around Shepparton, Victoria, to the second grade market.

He argues field tomatoes waste water, are picked green and don't develop the same sweetness as those ripened under glass. How far we've come in 20 years. We used to believe the sun and soil produced all the flavour.
 
It's the consumers driving that demand for vine-ripened tomatoes.

Consumers also want fresh washed spinach, in neat airy packets. Growers with contracts to supply the supermarkets often can't fill those from their own farm.

So a grower in the Central West of NSW, can pack up spinach in crates, and truck it 1000 km south, over Bass Strait to Tasmania, to be washed and packaged and shipped back north again to shoppers in Sydney and Melbourne.

That's a carbon footprint not printed on the label!

It brings into stark relief the growing interest in local food, that hasn't travelled half-way round Australia to meet the whim of consumers.

In my job, one month I'm at the Sustainable Food conference, where city consumers beg to get access to regional/seasonal produce, the next month I'm at the Ausveg Conference where growers promote the role of massive enterprises, supplying year round fruit and vegetables to supermarkets.

Follow the money - for those large players, big vegetable business pays, when dealing with two big supermarkets.

Going it alone: Indonesia's self sufficiency push

By: ABC Rural National Reporter, Sarina Locke

Achmad Ya'kub lives and works on the outskirts of Jakarta, growing vegetables, farming fish - and is the voice of Indonesia's Association of Peasant Farmers.

It's a group that represents 900,000 people and is believed to be behind the push towards self sufficiency of beef.

It's rare to see large herds of cattle in Indonesia, as most farmers have just two breeding cows.

There are two local breeds and both are small, sleek animals, with mustard coloured coats. They are bali cattle, and madura cattle. They're expensive by Indonesian standards, so when the price rises, farmers have been tempted in the past to sell breeding stock.

Since the live export debate, trade with Australia has slowed - pushing up local prices for cattle by some 20 per cent and making it tempting to sell off breeders.

But that's a sure way to kill off future production, so this time, Achmad says the Government's put a stop to it.

"The government has restricted us to not sell the mother of cow," he says quaintly, although I sadly confess his English is much better than my Indonesian.

Last year's census found Indonesia has 15 million cattle, (Australia has 27million). Beef is generally considered an expensive meat, and Indonesians consume on average 2.4 kg a year. (Australians consume 10 times that much).

Achmad, says it's rich middle class people buying the imported beef, so they're likely to just cut back as the price goes up.

"I think the Government has started (it). Because we give Government the solution, and we give the consumer organisation why we want this situation."

Does he think consumer pressure to have cheaper meat, will change the Government's mind?

"Yeah that could happen, because it is the powerful middle class."

That's why he says cattle farmers want to try to keep prices reasonable for consumers.

"We have to prove for the consumer, the farmer can grow the cow, so we can sell (at a) good price for the consumer."

There is significant skepticism among commentators in Indonesia, and in Australia, that Indonesian beef producers won't be able to meet domestic demand with local cattle.

Transporting cattle from the eastern islands of Indonesia is difficult;  and it's particularly hard to keep them to a good weight.

I've seen Australia's aid projects in West Timor, where new legume seeds are being trialled to to produce more hay in the wet season.

The hay would be fed to cattle headed out on ships to the big markets in Jakarta.

But legume seeds for a trial is a far cry from commercial scale planting. Farmers in one rural village had the legume hay, growing well, but no cows. The neighbouring village had cows, but no hay. Instead this hay was being supplied back to the local government to be sold for a profit to the cattle traders.

Australia is also working on improving cattle fertility in Indonesia. Cows, weighed down by parasites, or debilitating diseases, may only produce a calf every three years, and even then, there's a one in three chance the calf will die.

In 2010, Indonesian consumers bought meat from 2.2 million cattle - more than a quarter were imported.

The only way Indonesia could become self sufficient in meat, is to simply not eat much beef.

At a food security conference in Jakarta this month, the President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono urged all Indonesians to get behind self sufficiency. Was this code, to urge them not to protest if beef prices sky rocket, especially around the time of the festival ending Ramadan?

Last September, Indonesian peasant farmers protested loudly in the streets of Jakarta for more domestic support.

Achmad Yu'kub says they could do the same again, if the Government backflips and opens the doors once again to large numbers of Australian cattle.

Country Life: on loss, and solace

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

W.H. Auden 

'Closure' is a word so often used in the media and self-help pages these days that its etymology bears examination. As a noun, a closure refers to something used to stop something - a bottle, or a road; in philosophy, as controversially espoused by Hilary Lawson in Closure: A Story of Everything, it's an end to the pursuit of reason. It's used in mathematics, in parliamentary procedure, in business law and in computer scripting.

But most often we see it used in the everyday media - police officers and politicians hoping that a particular outcome will 'offer closure'. Grieving families search for closure, or aggrieved families accuse a particular court judgment of denying the same. Sportspeople acquitted of a charge, on the field or off, seek to 'move on' and 'obtain closure'.

It has become, to use Don Watson's term, a weasel word. Its meaning is obscured, sometimes deliberately, sometimes through ignorance or misunderstanding. And it has become a right, demanded and expected. We 'deserve' closure. 'I just want some closure', as though one can dip into the sugar bag and get a handful. It's a meaningless, glib, easy response by our media pundits, and a plea leached of all possible common empathy made by the desperate and the bewildered.

What we seek in loss, and what should be offered, is solace.

Let me describe by example, for solace is more complex than we may imagine, less rigid in its definition, malleable and for a great part, surprising in its origin.

My wife and I live in a very old house in central Victoria. For the best part of ten years, we shared the house with a large echidna. It lived beneath the floorboards of the skillion kitchen, and would often send our dog into paroxysms of anger at night as it dragged its spines along the undersides of the boards, slowly moving to its nest. The creature amused and intrigued us - was it a male? Where did it wander? How old was it?

Echidnas are terribly interesting. They have a keen sense of smell, but are nearly blind. Their hind legs face in reverse, in order for them to dig themselves into the earth quickly and completely. You may approach them quite closely, if you are quiet, move slowly and stay upwind of them. The claws of an echidna are immensely strong, capable of tearing ant and termite nests to pieces overnight.

Early last summer we were working in the front garden of our property when I noticed the echidna slowly walking up our dirt road. Occasionally it would stop and make a terrible grunting or wheezing sound, then slowly plough on towards the house. It reached our gate and sensing us, stopped and dug into the garden, still making frequent noises. We looked at it closely. Was it in pain? Was it searching for a mate? Our ignorance made us cruel, and we left the echidna where it was.

The next morning I came out to find the creature still in the garden, still moaning, for want of a better, less anthropomorphic, word. Realising my error now, I called the local wildlife service, who came and euthanased the echidna. It had been struck by a vehicle, and suffered massive internal injuries. There was nothing to be done for it.

We were horrified. This is of course not an uncommon end for a native animal, especially an echidna, which are slow and confused on roads. But we had come to be fond of it, and looked for it when we were around the house outside. Even the dog had come to grudging respect, after trying to grab it once and learning by bitter experience how well-equipped to defend themselves echidnas are.

My wife wept. How could someone strike a poor creature and leave it to suffer on the roadside? Why were people so ignorant of the world around them? The pain we felt for the dead animal was visceral, for it was the pain of our security that had been breached. The echidna was integral to our sense of home, to our daily life.

I wept for my inability to console my wife. It was a random death; inexplicable, awful. The creature had suffered because we were insensible to what was going on, and we had made its last hours excruciating. We were both mortified, and in the days and even weeks after, sought to alleviate and replace the image of that echidna, dragging itself in its death-throes, back to our house, to somewhere instinctively safe, in order to die.

But there was no answer - no 'closure'. Nor could there be. The echidna had lived, and it had died. It had died terribly. There is no other answer than that. Nothing could reverse what had happened, terrible and sudden. It had been destroyed, and all rationalisation would not erase the manner of its death. For all intents it was a small death in the world, an animal that amounted to no more than Larkin's hedgehog.

Time passed, and in time, the memory of the echidna became less painful. Then yesterday, as I returned from work, my wife ran to me across the property. She had seen a new, young echidna - small, still clumsy - wander across the yard, near to the workshed. It sniffed around a verandah on a building, then, haltingly and slowly, climbed onto the verandah, about a foot off the ground, and wandered curiously.

In attempting to climb off, it moved to the edge of the verandah, misjudged the distance to the ground and to my wife's delight, simply rolled off and onto the ground, somersaulting once or twice before ending on its back, legs waving. It righted itself and wandered back down the fenceline, before moving across to the house, pausing, and then digging in back under the kitchen.

Solace comes in fits and starts. It cannot be demanded or pursued. We can never know how or when or in what strange form loss will afflict us, and we cannot excise its pain by revenge or by formula. Grief must have its course, and in time and in its way, solace will inevitably follow.