Australian beekeepers can expect significant colony losses as the country’s bee industry transitions from an eradication approach to varroa mite to a management strategy, in the wake of several outbreaks in NSW this year. A nationwide effort to eradicate the pest in NSW since its first detection near Newcastle in June, 2022 has cost $100 million and involved the euthanasing of more than 30,000 hives. Scientific data and advice suggested a strategy of eradication was no longer possible due to limited resources and a sharp increase in recent detections thought to be caused by non-compliance of ..read more

A government grant has been awarded to Victoria’s leading rabbit control group to further its work with farmers in rabbit management. ANDY WILSON reports. The Victorian Rabbit Action Network has received $40,000 from Agriculture Victoria to employ a facilitator to coordinate field days with landholders. VRAN community representative Neil Devanny said the group’s outreach via ‘boot camps’ was designed to enable a community to undertake its own delivery program. “VRAN operates with some fantastic people doing some fantastic work, but we need someone to provide that facilitator role to help VRAN ..read more

Coming to grips with the jujube fruit can have you going in circles, as ANDY WILSON discovered. “It’s really like nothing else.” This is the most common response of consumers and fruit lovers when they first bite into a jujube fruit. “In terms of taste, it’s in between an apple and a date,” Seeka growers general manager Jonathan van Popering said as he tours some of the 16,000 jujube trees he has planted at Bunbartha in northern Victoria. “And structurally, the fruit is similar to an olive.” If that doesn’t confuse the first-time sampler, then the second bite answers the quandary by returning ..read more

Coolabah Turf has come a long way from a little business that started out in the middle of the drought in the front paddock of an Echuca property 20 years ago, SOPHIE BALDWIN discovered. Back in those days, Suzie and Brad Shearer had a young family and a dream to grow some grass. Brad would cut the turf and Suzie would hand roll it — with a baby lying in the pram next to her. However, with a focus on innovation, sustainability and quality staff, Coolabah Turf has now grown into one of the biggest turf businesses in the country — spanning 234 hectares under production, across six strategical ..read more

Just about every apple is perfect — for something. With the supermarkets and their predilection for perfection, that leaves a lot of the slightly misshapen, slightly off colour, slightly off the tree too early (ending up on the ground) or just too little or too late to make the contract grade. And then there is the purpose bred apple, the one grown from specialist cultivars, for a very special purpose, as ANDREW MOLE discovered. If you put a boffin and a boss together, do you get a boofhead? It’s a crossbreed worth considering — if some geneticist doesn’t get to it shortly, AI most certainly ..read more

Six demonstration farms in Victoria are part of a Landcare Australia Benchmarking project to measure changes in the condition of environmental assets. Applying a scientific lens to environmental accounting standard to environmental assets, will help those property owners to set up natural capital accounts. The project is listed on the Accounting for Nature Environmental Account Registry. Melbourne Water and Bass Coast Landcare Network have combined to facilitate the project — one of these properties is Burke and Bronwyn Brandon’s property at Moyarra. “The six farms are a mix of commercial g ..read more

When you are out the back of Bourke, properties are usually measured on the scale of small European countries. But big land doesn’t necessarily save you from being a small farmer more often than you would realise, writes ANDREW MOLE. Just outside Wentworth, one family steeped in pastoral tradition happily conceded, depending on the rain, their business lurches between being a small farm and a slightly bigger one If someone told you they were running more than 31,000 hectares — and then told you they were, from time to time, a small farm, you would almost certainly feel your eyebrows raise of t ..read more

It started off as a big industry. Then a booming industry — before imploding into what became barely an industry. But one Victorian stuck to his belief there was a serious future in the business, and 30 years down the track he has proved to be the prophet who always knew there would be a profit in emus. ANDREW MOLE reports. The last thing Jeff Long wants to see in one of his paddocks is an emu. Well, a real emu anyway. Because, in Jeff’s opinion, they are as mad as cut snakes and he doesn’t want any of that getting into the genetics of the docile commercial mob he has spent the past 30 years ..read more

Fraser Pogue was happily farming with three generations of his family at Ardmona in northern Victoria until one day, the kids wanted to go fishing — and they couldn’t find any worms on their farm, writes CARLY MARRIOTT. No worms on a farm? How could that be? Fraser realised that the conventional farming techniques he’d learnt at ag college and seen around the district were not lending themselves to healthy soils. And worms love healthy soils. Fraser didn’t know it at the time, but a lack of worms on that fateful day sent him down a rabbit hole of learning in which he experimented with a ran ..read more

Russell Calder is a revolutionary who has gone underground. He is not fomenting change, but he is most certainly fermenting it, writes ANDREW MOLE. Beneath great lines of hay and animal manure from which compost is produced and then fed to the worms at his Nyah West farm, Russell Calder is not breeding a subterranean insurrection. No, he is breeding worms. Thousands, tens of thousands, possibly (probably) millions, of worms. Worms with nothing to do but dig, eat and, well, and crap. Oh yes, it also doesn’t hurt that worms tend to breed faster than rabbits. And what this little wonder of nature ..read more