Winter farm tour 2009

Over fifty of us left Brisbane early Saturday morning in a convoy of cars and vans on Saturday morning, with orange flags flying from the windows.

Our first stop was Kingaroy, where the Blanch family have been farming their land organically for sixty years. We were greeted by three generations of farmers, who were keen to welcome us on to their farm, and to get us out into the onion and carrot fields so that we could get some dirt on our hands. They took us on a tour of their farm, which included an impromptu weeding competition for the kids, and the chance to pull up some very sweet carrots and to munch them straight from the soil. Then we headed over to the peanut shed for a picnic morning tea.

The Blanch family have the only certified organic peanut farm in Australia, and are the people behind the amazing Green Acre’s peanut butter that you may have tried. We arrived at the wrong time of year to see the peanut plants growing, but Evan and Lois and their family more than made up for it with a slide show of the life cycle of their peanut plants, and lots of peanuts to sample. Then they talked to us about their journey into organic farming, which Reg, Evan’s dad describes as being the ‘best decision, farming wise’ he ever made. Commercial peanuts are one of the most heavily sprayed crops, and before switching to organics he had been suffering from asthma, which may have been due to chemical exposure. They also let us in on some of the secrets of growing beautiful carrots (special tip from the experts: to keep your carrots growing straight make sure you grow them in plenty of soft loosely packed soil – as soon as the growing carrots hit a hard patch in the soil they will bend around it).

We piled back into the vehicles, along with plenty of bags of peanuts to sustain us through the next leg of the trip, and headed for the Sturgess’s farm in Gayndah, Queensland’s oldest town. The Big Orange is on the road outside Eric and Kate Sturgess’s orchards, their wonderful teahouse, fruit and gift store. The tour of the citrus orchard was scheduled for the next morning, but we stopped at the Big Orange to meet Kate and Eric, and of course, we had to pick a few mandarins, just to make sure we were in the right spot! It felt like a Food Connect invasion, with everyone setting up their tents across the road from the Big Orange, before we headed up the road to the Grand Hotel for a buffet dinner and a drink before hitting the hay for a good night’s sleep.

After breakfast and coffee we met up with Eric for a tour of the orchard. Eric invited us to pick any mandarins we wanted off the first few trees – and none of us needed any more encouragement than that. The kids went wild, coming back with make shift fruit bags in hats and t-shirts, stuffed full of fruit. Half the fun of picking the mandarins was feeding them to Shep, who has to be a one-of-a-kind, mandarin eating German Shepard. We tasted several different varieties of mandarins, and sampled oranges off one of the original orchard trees, which is over eighty years old. Eric is a natural storyteller, and talked about different propagation methods, and biological control agents that he uses to control different insect invaders.

Eric is a passionate Food Connect farmer, and is very much behind us, even though at this stage we are only able to buy around one percent of his crop. We are the only buyers who receive the same fruit that goes into his fruit shop – everyone else he supplies to wants their fruit waxed and treated. One of the most common questions that Eric gets asked at the Big Orange is ‘How come we can’t buy fruit like this in the shops?’ The answer is simple – all the fruit he sells in the Big Orange is picked and sold in a couple of days. When you buy Eric and Kate’s citrus through Food Connect it might have been off the tree for up to a week before you can take it home. Eric estimates that any fruit you buy from a supermarket or green grocer has been off the trees for a minimum of three weeks. In addition to that, it may have been picked green and artificially ripened. It’s something that Eric finds frustrating, as he is a farmer who takes a lot pride in the taste and flavour of the crop – so many outlets want farmers to pick for the dollar and not the flavour. Eric refuses to sell anything that is not ready to eat off the tree.

After the citrus tour Eric and Kate welcomed us back to the Big Orange teahouse for warm scones and pikelets with home made jams and cream – after which everyone was looking very content and feeling a little bit spoilt!

Eric, Kate and their granddaughter Shardai then led the way up to McConnells Lookout. From there we had a bird’s eye view of the local citrus orchards that run along the banks of the Burnett River.
Eric and Kate pointed out their orchard, and told us a little about the history of the district. We said our good byes to the Sturgess family at the lookout, then made our way back down to the Gayndah
Museum, to check out a bit more local history, and to see the display of lungfish from the Burnett River, before heading for home.