Organic News
Queensland fees the nation
18 July 08
 Winter is prime vegetable season in Queensland and the season when Queensland feeds the nation.
Located in heart of the Lockyer Valley, which according to the locals is one of the top ten most fertile farming areas in the world, Bauer’s Organic Farm draws its water from a crystal clear underground supply fed by Blackfellow Creek.
Rob Bauer, one of the pioneers of the certified organic industry in Queensland, has pioneered natural produce since the early 1980s. Generations of the Bauer family have farmed their scenic 326 hectare property since 1885 producing carrots, potatoes, broccoli, celery, zucchinis, tomatoes and corn.
You can see how they do it on the farm with a tour.
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Earthly riches | Sydney Morning Herald | 5 Oct 06
 The battle for
the organic dollar is hotting up but do organics really have an edge?
Steve Skopolianos scans a sea of lettuce, the symmetrical waves of growth
stretching half a kilometre to the banks of the Maribyrnong River. He reels
off their varieties with the pride of an old-style farmer with soil in his
veins.
"Frisee endive, red oak, red coral, cos lettuce, green coral . . ." The list
goes on and on.
His pleasure at this glistening crop sprouting from the deep chocolate-red
loam on the river flats at Keilor - just 20 minutes' drive to the north-west
of Melbourne's CBD - is palpable. Organic bounty such as this is Australia's
new gold and Skopilianos has come full circle. His grandfather, George
Damtis, first tilled the same ground with a horse and plough, using the same
methods of sustainable agriculture, more than 50 years ago.
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Organics on a budget - what are the best buys for your own health (and the
planet)?
Sydney Morning Herald - 19 June 07
It was flinchin g at the $10.00 price tag on a kilo of Brussels sprouts at
the local organic market that got me thinking. If the food budget can only
stretch to a few organic items then it makes sense to invest in those foods
which - when produced non-organically - may have higher pesticide residues.
But how do you know what these foods are?
If you're a shopper in the US, you're in luck - there's a fact sheet
produced by an environmental organisation, the Environmental Working Group,
listing the fruits and vegetables likely to have both the highest and lowest
residues. But in Australia, it's not so easy - there's no one place listing
all the pesticides used on different fruits and vegetables, says Jo Immig of
the National Toxics Network,
http://www.oztoxics.org/ntn/,a consumer based organisation working to
reduce pollution. While some produce might have many pesticides registered
for use on it, this doesn't mean the pesticides will actually be used, or
even that there will be residues. On the other hand, some foods may have
just a couple of pesticides registered for use on them - but they might be
nasty ones and potentially more harmful, she explains. So what's a shopper
to do?
A spokesperson for one of the oranisations that certifies organic food
in Australia thought the answer was simple - just buy everything organic.
In a perfect world I'm sure that makes sense, but on the planet where
I live - which has single parents and students struggling on meagre incomes
- it's not always realistic.
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Earthly riches | Brisbane Courier Mail | 26Sep 06
ORGANICS have come a long way since the days when you'd be lucky to find a
few dusty looking carrots or blemished apples at the local fruit shop.
It is now the fastest growing sector of the food industry.
There are
dedicated organic stores, outlets such as health food shops,
delicatessens, food emporiums and even supermarkets carrying an extensive
range of organic goods ? and this is due to ever-increasing consumer
demand.
The decision to go organic can be made for many reasons. Eating organic
produce enables us to avoid the intake of artificial chemicals, pesticides
and food additives, and because of the way organic produce is grown, it
usually contains higher levels of vitamins and nutrients.
Above all, though, it's the flavour of organic fruit and vegetables,
perhaps best described as "tasting like they used to", which persuades
people to make the change.
The recipes today are some of the most simple and flavoursome. The chicken
in particular uses one of the oldest methods of cooking poultry and makes
sure the the full flavour of both the bird and the vegetables is retained.
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Organics Agog - Brisbane Courier Mail | 1Aug06
WORLDWIDE demand for organic food is booming and Australian producers
can snare a bigger slice of the market, according to a government report.
The Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC) has
delivered a broad study of the organics industry, finding demand for the
products is outstripping supply around the globe.
"Organics is one of the fastest growing sectors in the food industry
overall, experiencing double digit growth in most developed markets, compared
with 1 to 2 per cent growth rate for conventional food products,"
the report said.
"There is a large amount of latent unsatisfied demand for organic
foods."
Most big supermarkets in developed countries stock at least a small range
of organic products, including leafy vegetables, dairy and some processed
food.
But in the most developed nations such as the US, Japan and in Europe,
organics has become a mainstream category of food, showing strong demand-driven
expansion.
While demand began with fruit and vegetables, it has expanded into meat,
dairy products, wine, cereals and processed fruits, and the emergence
of boutique supermarkets has broadened the range of products even further.
Japan is Australia's biggest market, taking just over one third of our
organic exports including meat, cereals, beverages and spices.
The second biggest market is continental Europe, collecting 26 per cent
of exports, followed by Britain at 17 per cent.
The report identifies export expansion opportunities for Australia, especially
in cereals.
"The cereal category is one where demand is reported to consistently
outstrip supply in key markets such as Europe and Japan," the RIRDC
said. "Australia's competitiveness in cereals and pulses will allow
it to be competitive in baked products, noodles and pasta."
The absence of foot and mouth and mad cow diseases also provided opportunities
for expanding Australia's organic meat exports.
RIRDC highlighted organic wine as showing strong export growth potential,
after the success of conventional wine exports to the UK, US and Europe.
"As per-capita consumption of wine in these countries increases
and people become more sophisticated, there will be a growing demand for
organic wines," the report said.
Plenty to chew over - Sydney Morning Herald
24 March 06
If you're prepared to - or are preparing to - fork out the
extra cash and go organic in your eating, it may be what you're not paying
for that will do you the most good. Pesticides, for example.
Immunologist, restaurateur and organic food advocate Dr Robert Warlow
is adamant that they are one of the big threats to our health.
"Pesticides by and large have extremely long half lives that are
measured in years, not in days or even hours," Warlow says. "Very
few if any are biodegradable, and moreover most are finely lipid soluble
[dissolve in fat] - one of the reason they're so effective as metabolic
poisons. They invariably get deep inside cells to the point they get into
and bond to or damage DNA. That's how they exert their toxicity."
What about withholding periods - not picking fruit or vegetables for
a prescribed number of days after application?
"They have no meaning whatsoever," Warlow says.
Biochemist and pesticide expert John Pollak, a retired reader at the
histology and anatomy department at Sydney University, agrees.
"One should talk about pesticide formulations - the active component
can only make up from 5 to 30 per cent - other components like detergents
and solvents can themselves be toxic and can often enhance the toxicity
of the active component," Pollak says.
He believes that withholding periods are "useful" - to a certain
extent. It doesn't get rid of them, but it may decrease the amounts and
the potential toxicity. He agrees we should minimise exposure to pesticides.
But how do you avoid pesticides, herbicides, growth stimulants and antibiotics
in meat and the use of artificial fertilisers by farmers on their land?
There's only one sure way. Eat certified organic food.
Warlow and another pro-organic doctor, Silas Taylor, cite harm minimisation
as the major reason for their position while remaining cautious about
the current level of scientific research into the positive health benefits
of organic food.
Taylor is a physician who has given up practising medicine to become
a nutritional health educator and consultant. His support for organic
food is based on his "gut feeling that food that isn't plastered
with pesticides and meat that isn't pumped full of hormones and antibiotics
not only might taste better but surely it's the route of less harm."
Although, as a scientist, he concedes some of the research evidence is
"a little difficult for me to take on".
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Growing organically
Brisbane Courier Mail
28feb06
ANDRE Leu's first exposure to organic farming was hardly
propitious – working in a Kuranda orchard for $20 a week, sleeping in
the packing shed and living on fruit scavenged from the orchard.
But, as he says of his employer, the late Fred Briggenshaw: "He didn't like
to part with his money but he did like to part with his knowledge."
Briggenshaw had a superb library packed with the classics of organic farming
– F.H. King, Rudolf Steiner, Albert Howard and Julius Hensel – which, with
his experience, he made readily available to the Sydney-raised Leu.
The seeds were sown. Leu is now the chairman of the Organic Federation of
Australia, the peak body representing 5000 stakeholders. As he says, it is
partly an industry and partly a movement, and as supply chains go, it is
more of a web.
Leu's farm is a tropical fruit orchard in the far north's Daintree with most
of his 164 ha given over to rainforest. He has about 20 ha under production,
principally lychees, rambutan and star apples with smaller plantings of
durian and mangosteens. He has had the property since 1991 after owning
farms at Kuranda and Millaa Millaa on the Atherton Tableland.
In between, there has been time in and out of the industry. Over the years
he's garnered a couple of university degrees in communication and adult
education, enjoyed several stints as a professional musician, and embarked
on regular plant-gathering trips to South-East Asia.
Leu estimates he has introduced 25 new tropical species to Australia over
the past few decades including salaks, dukus, langsats, santols, sapodillas
and chempedaks. Not household words yet, but neither were rambutans and
lychees a few years back.
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