We roam around Mackay visiting farms and hearing about the experiments and inventions of farmers. And rumbling just below the surface is an anxiety. It’s the troubling undercurrent that got us here in the first place – the seemingly unsolvable tension of Sugar vs the Reef. Kim and I have talked back and forth about all of […]
Fantastic to be introduced to “Ray the Soil Guy” by Simon Mattsson today. I really love his way of explaining soils. We are keen to try out some of these comparison experiments in Simon’s sugarcane fields. Ray talks about how one of the soils in this video has 6% organic carbon. This is huge compared to what […]
This meeting was my first introduction to some of the people in Mackay who Lucas has been cultivating connections with. The Greater Whitsunday Food Network is an alliance of food growers who are building a profile and promoting local food through events, demonstrations, educational programs and a Wednesday Growers’ Market. Deb McLucas from Freckle Farm […]
This morning I visited the Garden of Tegan in Balberra, about thirty minutes south of Mackay city, where there was an open house for the recently established permaculture market garden. Tegan and her partner are now living their dream of growing organic food and are currently experimenting with different crops to gauge their suitability for […]
This blog post is a rumination on a possibility raised by a bunch of conversations with farmers I’ve been having over the past fortnight: the idea of bringing cattle and sugar cane into a mutually beneficial integrated system. Cattle and cane together also gives us the opportunity to accompany this story with a Go-Betweens soundtrack: […]
“The future of sugar cane is not purely sugar cane”. This quote comes from a discussion I was having on Friday with a young canefarmer called Scotty, along with his father Allan and my main sugar-guru, Simon. We were sitting in the tray of a ute after having “done the rounds” of the farm. It […]
On Tuesday morning I joined more than 50 farmers at the Walkerston Leagues Club to hear a “breakfast talk” on the importance of soil health in sugar cane growing. The event started at six thirty in the morning. Six thirty! That’s way too early. An artist like me should still be dreaming at six thirty. […]
Last November when I visited Mackay, Simon Mattsson’s first ever dual crop of sugar cane + sunflowers was in its prime. Here’s Simon with fellow canefarmer Alan McLean, posing among the flowers: At the time, I made this short video about the experiment: This week Simon showed me the next generation of his dual […]
As I learn little bits each day about the life and times of sugar, en route to becoming a Cane-Nerd, I’ll post them here. Today’s “thing wot I learnt” is this: Sugar cane is a grass. It grows a bit bigger than the average lawn, but yep, it belongs to the same family. According to […]
En route to Mackay, we stopped in Rockhampton. There, perusing the local newspaper, I noticed this article. Across 140,000 farms in Australia, 90% of which are family-owned, the average age of farmers is 58. When they retire, many of these farmers will not be replaced by their children. What then?