For the last seven months I have been living away from my farm. In the mornings I've been commuting to the farm to do the day's work, then driving again in the evening to the mate's who's kindly shared his home with me. It's been a time of frustration, of living out of the back of my car, of forgetting things and having to drive to get them, of not being at the farm when I'm needed, when the ducks are eating the salad, or the tunnels are being scrapped by the wind, and there's been many days of having to finish up early due to rain, without the option of turning out later in the day to finish the job. 

And it's taken this long to work out all the difficult family stuff, amidst the sturm und drang, not to mention the lawyers and banks.

But at last, on Friday, the settlement went through, and I'll be moving back to the farm next week, on a tide of ebullience...in time to take hold of the garden as she rises strong to spring.

*This is an edited version of a speech to the Huon Producers Network Annual General Meeting, 17.9.2014
https://www.facebook.com/huonvalleyproducers

Hi everyone and thanks for coming along to the Annual General Meeting of the Huon Producers Network, and thank you also for giving me this  opportunity to speak.

The topic I’ve chosen for tonight is “Living on the Land” — which basically makes it easy for me to bang on about the things closest to my heart for half an hour. So here we go….

So here we all are, trying to make a living off the land, on our own terms, in the Huon Valley, on a smallish scale, in this modern age of multinationals and industrial agriculture, and for me this raises the question: is this realistic? How viable are our expectations of living on the land?

Are we a bunch of hopeless romantics befuddled by this dream of life on the land, of gentle rains and growing plants and sunny afternoons, and a good ache at the end of the day? Of bounteous harvests and being beholden to no man or woman? Of a sustainable life close to nature?….sounds lovely, doesn't it!

Well, statistically speaking, people, this is all looking pretty dreamy… 

What a lot of us here are trying to do — make an income from a small scale farm — is bucking a long-term trend that is still accelerating. In the last three decades the number of farmers in Australia has dropped by 40% as small-scale farmers sell out …and as the big guys get bigger. 

Even in the last few years I’ve watched this happen around Cygnet, where two mid-size orchardists on my road are pulling out trees while in Nicholls Rivulet the Harvey orchard continues to expand with new plantings.

Economies of scale are one reason for the decline of the small farms. The farms on my road just weren’t making enough money anymore as the price of apples dropped and the price of diesel rose. Imports and interstate competition dropped apple prices, and fuel is only going to become more expensive as the wells decline. To turn a profit from margins reduced by global factors, you’ve got to get bigger or sell out.

Another reasons for the decline of the small-scale farm is an ageing population of farmers: When you think of a farmer, you imaging a leathery old bloke in dusty clothes on a tractor, and this is largely a true image. Farmers are significantly older than the average Australian worker, and as these farmers retire, there are fewer of the following generation who choose to farm for a living.

There’s a reason for this. Farmers work bloody hard, significantly harder than the average Australian, more hours for significantly less income. I am a prime example of this. Last financial year, I worked between 50-60 hours a week for an income of $35,000, which equates to the princely sum of $13 dollars per hour. I am not in the big league. I could earn more managing a McDonalds. Or just working in one!

So to earn a living from a farm you have to work physically harder, for longer hours, for less money. It’s not sounding great, is it?

Maybe I won’t go on to talk about the far higher than average death rates of farmers due to accident? Suicide? I won’t talk about drought or crop failure. Or of the winter days at the market when everybody has stayed at home, and it’s raining and you’ve lost money?

Or those seemingly endless summer days when you drag yourself out of bed in the dark, again, to tend to your crops, and don’t get back to the house until after sunset, again, and you talk to your mates from the mainland with city jobs who are spending the weekend at the beach. Again.

It’s fraught, living on the land, it’s hard work with little recognition and less pay….so why do we do it? Why? Are we engaged in some delusive pursuit of a romantic notion?

Or are there ameliorating factors? We are all here having a go at this, so what is it that makes living on the land worthwhile, against all this evidence?

Well, I’ve been farming on a small scale for almost five years now, and am planning to continue to do so, so I obviously I do think there are factors that make living on the land worthwhile.

But money is not one of them! If you are gunning for the millions, you might want to look elsewhere!

It’s not about the money. Money is not a way of keeping score, it is a way of continuing to do what you love. The money is not an end in itself, it is a means to keep the farm going, and to provide for the poor times, and to build up a bank for when you retire. So financial considerations aside, what is there to love about living on the land?

I reckon there’s a few things worth mentioning. Lifestyle comes to mind straight away. I mean, I have these mates in the city who do get weekends at the beach, and trips overseas, and who eat out a lot — but they are stuck in an office all week. Some of them even like their jobs — but every one of them would give it up if they had the money not to work.

Whereas if I had a million or two, I would still be gardening and farming. Probably on a larger scale, and certainly with more employees. Or employees at all, in fact. And holidays, ahhh holidays… I'd take holidays! But I’d still be farming, still living on the land. So it’s about lifestyle, but what else?

Sometimes I think about the personality traits that drive some people to take up farming, and not others. 

Independence would be one; not wanting to work for a boss, enjoying making your own mistakes, and the challenge of fixing things that are broke (often by yourself). Maybe also an aversion to crowds, or a dislike of hustle, bustle and noise, such as you find in the city. What about a contented nature? A desire to live simply?

But most of all I reckon your small-scale farmer is characterised by excessive optimism. So much optimism. And if you are not well endowed with optimism, then I don’t think you’d last long!

Because you have to believe you can do better next year. That you will remember to water all those carrot sowings, and therefore have a crop for winter, that you will put up netting over the peas before the damn ducks eat them all, and you will keep the weeds down so there isn’t a plague of cutworms that eats your entire corn crop for the year. 

And yes, that's all happened to me.

Optimism. This is the same optimism that gets you out of the bed in the dark on market morning despite last week’s miserable takings: It’s sure to be better this week!

This same optimism carries you through the wet months of spring when the farm is a quagmire and you are carrying a couple of kilos of mud on each boot and your ‘waterproofs’ are proving to be misnamed: Just think of how the seedlings will pop up when the sun returns!

And, inevitably, the sun does return. Not everything fails. Some of the crops even turn out better than expected. And sometimes you take a moment to lean on your hoe and look around, sunlight on your shoulders and warm earth at your feet. Things are looking good and you gaze around and wonder “they let me do this for a living? How good is that?”

And indeed it is good. And in yet another incidence of scientists going to great lengths to tell us what we already knew intuitively, there are now studies confirming that time spent in nature is beneficial to human health and happiness.

One such study showed that mental and physical recovery from an operation was significantly better when patients had access to natural surroundings. Another study showed that people were significantly happier if they had been outdoors during any given day.

We kind of knew this already, I think? And the farming life — living on the land — is replete with good air, good exercise, and being outdoors. There is goodness gained from being in nature even on the most miserable day — you may not be ready to admit to this until you are back inside, dry, by the fire, sipping tea, but it is so. Even an unexpected and foul-falling November frost has it’s beauty.

So there are indisputable personal and aesthetic reasons for living on the land. And beyond the personal and aesthetic I think there are other considerations that make living on the land worthwhile. Community. I think part of living on the land is being embedded in a local, rural community where you see the same faces week after week and month after month. Year after year.

Where you know and have a relationship with the people who serve you at the garage, the library and the shop, as well as the people you sell your produce to. Where even if you are not particularly fond of someone, you make an effort. You live in the same valley, you’ve got to learn to get along.

And you end up with friendships with people you’d probably never be friends with if you lived in the city, and you form relationships that can be challenging but are always worthwhile. It seems to me that living on the land, we are far more dependent on those around us than are city dwellers. 

I have a neighbour who is very different to me, and whom I find difficult occasionally, and we’ve had our small disagreements, but when something goes wrong — and on the land things do go wrong more often than elsewhere — there’s no question. Pitch in an help out. Do what is necessary. 

When I tipped up my tractor bringing in the hay last year, I had no idea how to right it, or whether it would be broken or how to fix it. A couple of my neighbours convened at the scene the next day. One neighbour brought his big tractor along. My other neighbour, the one I find difficult, brought along expertise and advice. He helped right the tractor, cigarette in mouth the whole time, and assured me it’d be fine in a few days once I’d ‘let the oil settle’. He was right.

I’m never going to be invited into this man’s home, nor he mine (except in an emergency), but we acknowledge each other on the road, and there is trust, if not friendship, between us. We each can be relied upon.

More recently, I separated from my wife, and although I felt I’d made some good friends over my 4 or 5 years here, I was surprised, and gladdened, by the amount of support received by me — and my now ex-wife — from the community around us. I think sometimes I still have a hangover from being city-bred, that my default setting is ‘impersonal’, while long-time country residents are used to being a known entity in a knowing community, where local news is not just ‘gossip’, it is the basis for sympathy or action. 

So living in a rural community — living on the land — brings it’s own challenges and rewards, and invests meaning in the everyday.

But apart from the personal and community aspects, for me there’s a wider reason for living on the land too, a philosophical reason that is a reflection of the current state of the world to the best of my knowledge.

As far as I can tell, we as a species need to act on behalf of the planet. Fundamentally, this comes down to carbon. There’s too much of it in the atmosphere, and the best place for it is the soil.

We put more carbon into the atmosphere every time we use fossil fuels, and most fossil fuels are used for feeding humans. Fossil fuels to manufacture fertiliser. Also, many conventional fertilisers are made from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels power agricultural machinery to till the soil and spread the fertiliser. Fossil fuels are used to harvest plants, and process them into food-like substances, and to manufacture food packaging made from fossil fuels, then to package the food-like substances, then for the temperature control and transport of food and food-ish stuffs. That’s a lot of oil and coal and gas right there.

So this is a systemic issue.

This is a big picture, really big, and I’m only a small guy. I don’t feel up to challenging Monsanto or Shell. I don’t like shouting and protest. So when I came to this realisation about where the world stands, and thought about what I could do to help, what was the rational response, I came to the conclusion that growing vegetables for a local market ticks a lot of boxes.

Managed properly, organic farming returns carbon to the soil, sequestering it. Better still, more carbon in the soil is better for plants as well as the planet, so it’s win - win. If I farm right then I’m putting carbon back in the soil, and growing better vegetables.

Then, if I sell these fresh vegetables locally, then not only is my produce carbon neutral (or better), every sale I make is one less beetroot or bunch of carrots that has been grown, washed, packaged and transported by the carbon intensive conventional food network. Hopefully, it’s one less item of packaged, food-like-substance sold. And because my produce is fresh, it's retained it's nutrient value. So that’s a me-customer-planet win-win-win also. 

So growing organically and selling locally is living on the land with an eye to the global situation.

And those three reasons for living on the land - the personal, the community and the global, is what I see here tonight in this community called the Huon Producers Network. 

And despite the hardships physical and financial, the lack of holidays or spending money, there’s something about living on the land you just won’t find anywhere else. All the toil and drudgery is more than made up for by the joys of a bountiful crop, the cheerfulness of the friend/customer, the help of a neighbour, the beauty of the day around you, the optimistic knowledge that what you are doing is good for the earth.

Living on the Land — why wouldn’t you?

Ok, so I'm a little behind here, as we have officially moved on to Spring, but I can't get past the beauty of the winter leek. She sits sturdy and slender through the frosts, reaching out to the pale moon, and her sweet unctuous flavour is a boon to the root vegetable soups and stews of the season.

The leek above was planted as a seedling on the 18th of February, and after a quick autumn growth spurt, has been slowly coming to size all through the dark of winter. The earlier plantings (in early and mid January) have all gone to market now, and the beds have been turned over to spinach for spring. All in all it's been a great winter for leeks. This year's stand out variety is the Bulgarian Giant, which as you can see above, grows tall with pale green tops, has excellent flavour, and is easier to harvest than the de Carentans that I grew as the second planting.

At the market, I am sometimes asked how much of the leek to eat, and people tell me they cut off of the green tops for the compost. This idea has come about, I think, for two reasons. Firstly, with a shop-bought leek which may be several weeks old, the green tops are the first part of the plant to dehydrate and become woody. Secondly, the folds of the leek where the leaves begin to spread often contain soil that needs to be washed away, and it is easier to cut the top off the leek and use only the clean lighter part of the stem.

I find both these practices wasteful. With a trimmed fresh leek, like the one above, the whole of the plant is palatable, and should be tender enough right to the top. (And indeed I use even the trimmed green offcuts for an especially tasty leek and potato soup -- the trick is to slice the tops very finely across the grain to shorten the tougher fibres in the greener parts of the leaf.) Fussy French cooks will tell you to use only the white part of the leek on principle, but with a fresh plant and a little effort, your food will be more colourful...

Which brings us to washing out the soil from the folds of the leaves. Firstly, cut the leek in half lengthwise, as in photo above. Note that the cut is made with the leek lying flat, so the spreading leaves are out to either side -- this means the dirtier parts are more easily accessible when you get to the sink.

At the sink, hold the leek with the root end up and the trimmed top down, and gently separate the leaves around the folds under running water, and rub away any soil you find. Generally there will only be soil in the first two or three layers, and the water will be washing the soil away from the roots and out the trimmed top. If you hold the leek flat, or  root-down, the soil will be washed further into the folds of the leeks, making it even more difficult to be rid of. 

So, wash with the root end up and enjoy every inch of the queen of winter vegetables!

 Don't it just say Spring!

Not only have we been enjoying an unprecedented run of warm, sunny weather, the asparagus is now springing up from the raised beds in the Dell patch, and first dibs are always for the farmer. Eggs are coming in now too, as well as spinach, so we're looking at asparagus, eggs and greens for lunch, on the deck, in the sun, with the apple trees blossoming.

I know we'll be having more cold weather and rain, and that September is often the worst month of the year, but with this cheer in the belly it's impossible not to be optimistic!

Here at 43 degrees South, the winter days become rather short. Between about the 8th of May and the 7th or 8th of August, there are less than 10 hours of sunlight each day. This has huge ramifications for plants (and for gardeners!).

With less than 10 hours a day of sunlight, plants languish. Fresh sowings and small seedlings, particularly, have not enough leaf cover to convert the scant sunlight into significant growth. Larger plants from earlier sowings will get by, and even put on weight (especially those from the Brassica family), but compared to the heady, fifteen and sometimes sixteen hour days of summer, the garden is moving very sloooowly.

Which is why the young garlic shoots seem so cheerful. Shoved into the cold, damp soil a few weeks ago, they happily pop their heads above the parapet, and each day as I walk past, they've put on an extra centimetre or two, oblivious to the cold and the damp and the frosts and the wind and the straggling vegies around them.

And this Saturday is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of them all, with a meagre nine hours of light, after which our side of the planet begins to tilt back toward the sun.  

So maybe the garlic has a reason to be cheerful!

Doesn't it look magnificent? Roughly 3,000 corn plants reaching for the sky, flowers ablaze in the sun, dripping pollen onto the waiting silks below, each pollinated silk connected to a single nub on the ear, starting its journey from nothing to a ripe yellow kernel, thousands of silks and kernels at a time.... 

At least, that's what happened last year, resulting in a beautiful (and relatively profitable) harvest of corn from mid-March to late April. This year, due to the Dread Dark Sword Grass (5/12/2013), my entire first plantings were swallowed by voracious cutworms, and the corn you see above was a speculative set of second plantings, started in succession from late November. Late being the operative word.

She grew, the corn, unbothered by the (now-sated?) grubs, and grew well. By March I was wandering thoughtfully down the rows that rose above my head, enjoying the whisper and swish of a burgeoning corn-field, and was daring to hope for a warm autumn, an early ripening, a discovery that what they said about corn in Tassie was wrong....maybe the microclimate of Golden Valley was sunnier and warmer than I thought?

And in mid-April there it was: ripe ears on the first planting. Succulent, sweet and plentiful -- sure, it was late, and the corn was not ripening in a block the way it did last year, when you could just walk down the rows and break off each ear. I had to feel each ear for firmness, and for that rounded end that signified fully ripened kernels, and often I had to rip off the husk a little to check for colour and plumpness....but that's ok, I'm still getting corn.

To weeks later the full, grim picture became clearer:

This is an ear from the second surviving planting. As you can see, maybe one tenth or less of the kernels are ripened; the rest are small and/or shrunken, even though the ear is a good size, and the silks are browned off. The third and fourth plantings didn't even get to size, and are only good for corn-silk tea. So that's the end of the corn for this year.

I could moan about all that effort, the time taken and the ground covered with these plantings, but it was always speculative to plant that late. On the upside,  I still ate a lot of delicious corn over several weeks, and now I know when NOT to plant corn in future.

So I'm now thinking of the corn crop as a big green manure for my pea plantings, which will begin in a month or so. If anyone asks, that's what I'll tell them, anyway!

This week I've had a case of the Autumn Yellows. They're a bit like the Winter Blues, but not quite as bad.

They're a lot like this avenue of Lombardy Poplars on Slab Road, fresh and green all summer, now fading.  As I drove by yellow leaves drifted listlessly in the chill breeze. It feels like summer's over and I missed it; like winter's almost here and I'm not ready. The falling leaves bode.

They bode of the slow dark days ahead when the soil is endlessly damp and the fingers chilled, when vegetables don't grow, but if you pull a weed it just puts down roots and keeps going. In the depths of winter, summer is an impossible dream.

Add to this upheavals on the family front, and the Autumn Yellows deepen. It's a melancholy time of year, with everything trending down, from sunlight to growth to farm finances. 

So the yellow leaves drift over the road and are pushed to the verges by the passing cars, there to rot and steep and give off that smell peculiar to poplars.... and next spring, hopefully,  there'll be green shoots again...

Autumn has most definitely arrived in the garden. The passing of the equinox last week was confirmation of the change of seasons, which, as always, takes me by surprise.

I think it's because the year in the garden starts slow, then gets faster and faster and faster 'till you're in February and EVERYTHING needs to be done RIGHT NOW and then you hit the equinox and look around and say 'where did summer go?'.

And suddenly it's all done (or woe betide if it isn't), and there's less to do because a) growth is slowing so the mad dash of harvest-bed prep-sow is slower too; and b) because if the carrots, beets, leeks, kale and brassicas aren't in now, there's not a whole lot of point worrying about them until next year.

So there's time to do a bit of weeding, and to put up the portable poly tunnels over sowings of lettuce, rocket, endive and coriander.

There's also time to appraise how the tomatoes are progressing. Back in November, I planted my tomatoes and mulched them heavily with spoiled silage (see 'The Next Big Thing' below). 

The idea was to let the tomatoes sprawl over the mulch -- no nipping of shoots, no trellising or tying . So far this strategy has paid off, with plentiful tomatoes on the vines, but there are drawbacks. Firstly, allowing the tomatoes to sprawl means more bending over to harvest; secondly, the tomatoes are close to the ground and more open to slug attack.

My feeling is that the extra harvest work of bending over is more than made up for by not having to nip, trellis and tie. This is especially so as these activities come right at the start of the busy season where one less job is a godsend.

Again, with the sprawling vines, there are more damaged fruit than you'd see on a trellised plant, but...the net yield of the sprawling vines is still much greater even with the spoiled fruit. 

This successful algebra of waste is particularly apparent with the smaller-fruited tomato varieties, like these Stupice.

I reckon that for every ten kilo of Stupice I harvest, there's about half a kilo of damaged fruit (which goes into sauce). The game changes with the larger varieties, though. My Rouge de Marmande vines are busting out in small clusters of huge fruit, but the bigger the fruit the greater the likelihood of damage.

I have found a way around this, however: pick the fruit at first colour. The unripe tomatoes are not as attractive to pests, and they will ripen beautifully in a protected place.

Then all that remains is to spend a sunny afternoon sorting through the tomatoes, grading them into 'ripe' (centre left), 'spoilt/sauce' (top left), and 'leave to ripen further' (top right). The tubs at the front and in the tractor bucket are yet to be graded.

But then again, with the workload easing, some Autumn afternoons are so perfect......

...one simply must go boating on the Huon.

Here is a photo of me and various familiar Cygnet-ites (Cygnetians?) on a drizzly Sunday couple of years ago. I like the photo because everyone is smiling (Alan is smiling; you just can't tell from this angle).

The photo is also pertinent because it was taken on an off-market Sunday, and therefore answers several queries I've had on the blog in the last week, asking where to find my vegetables when the Cygnet Market is not on.

The Answer: I am in Cygnet with my stall every Sunday from 10-ish am. When the Cygnet Market isn't on, I set up on the lawn of Balfour House, next to the Red Velvet Lounge, and am usually there until 2-ish in the afternoon.

Cam the organic bread man sometimes joins me, but when he doesn't, I have a selection of his tasty sourdough loaves at my stall.

Hope to see you there!

In the photo above you can see the potato plants in their full glory, leaping upwards and shading out the weeds between the rows. That was a couple of months ago.

Now the plants have mostly died back and it is time to get on with the arduous work of digging out the spuds.

I start at the bottom of the row, as it is easier to work uphill than down. First I pull off the wilted vines and chuck them on the row that's already been dug. If the weather is dry, the vines wilt and become brittle and the hoe on the tractor chops them into the soil.

The spadework starts at the extremities of the row and works inward and up. Even so, I still manage to cut a few spuds in half as I go along (and why is it always the big ones?).  The potatoes in the picture are Nicolas, a variety favoured in the Mediterranean for its firm, waxy, sweet yellow flesh, and they have become a favourite of mine this year too.

The steel bucket is there for damaged or green potatoes. I remove these spuds to a separate pile where they wither and die in the sun. If the damaged potatoes are left in situ, they get hoed and chopped into the soil and become vigorous weed competition for the following crop (in this case brassicas; mostly broccoli for the winter, but also some cabbages and cauliflower. You can see a few seedlings in the rows to the right of the potatoes).

It's perfect potato digging weather right now. With the soil so dry, the potatoes crumble out of the earth almost clean enough to eat. I'm hoping that with the bulk of the winter plantings out the way, I can get stuck in over the next few weeks and dig most of the spuds before the autumn rains arrive....all I have to do now is to figure out where to store several tons of potatoes...ideas, anyone?