The idea, cooked up with Simon Mattsson and John Sweet, for a demonstration farm for the sugarcane industry has been kicking around for a few years now. This week Kim and I reconvened to think about pushing it a bit further. We’re working with an architect to sketch up a visualisation of the facility. The […]
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 […]
On Friday Lucas and I spent the day at Simon Mattson’s farm, having a fun time printmaking with his wife Susie, son Luke and daughter Sophie while Simon was out in the paddocks working. The harvesting crew could be seen in the background, giving the fully grown sugarcane a number one clip to the ground. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]