Following our meeting with Jim Pearce MP, we’ve been thinking about what a Sugar Cane Demonstration Farm could look like. On Saturday Kim and I sat down with farmer Simon Mattsson and brainstormed a few ideas. I made the scrappy sketch pictured above while we talked. Fundamental idea 1: The Sugar Cane Demonstration Farm needs […]
John Sweet called up Jim Pearce, the state Labor MP for Mirani and asked for a meeting. As part of John’s vision to redesign the entire Great Barrier Reef Catchment along Keyline principles, he brings together people to catalyse that small thing which might just set something big in motion. So the fact that Kim and I are visiting Mackay was John’s occasion to “Summon […]
This is John Sweet. John’s a retired farmer, Keyline Design Consultant (and good mate of PA Yeomans), community activator and health advocate. It’s his determination which got us up to Queensland in the first place. John connects people with people. He doesn’t use computers or mobile phones but he has a stronger social network than […]
It’s busy times for artists and farmers in Mackay. With “the crush” now in full swing, harvesters are out in the fields, those cute little trains are chuffing around hauling carriages full of cane to the mills, and the mills are working 24/7 to process it all. Tis a mighty effort, and all over town […]
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 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 […]
