TasWeekend: Fields of dreams around our state
YOU never know what ventures you might find on Tasmanian land these days. Meet some of the many innovative producers thinking outside the box
Lifestyle
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A DRIVE along the country roads of Tasmania has always delivered a visual feast: the wonderful hop vines in the Derwent Valley, the orchards of the Huon and those amazing poppies currently in bloom up north. But poppies are no longer the only crops creating blankets of colour, with lavender, saffron and, most recently, linseed creating flowering fields of purple. And these days it seems you are almost as likely to encounter Scottish Highland cows and rare breed pigs than you are a paddock full of sheep.
TasWeekend has been out and about meeting producers who are thinking laterally about how to use their land. Some have purposefully sought a point of difference, while others have been driven by necessity to look beyond convention.
Branching out
Remember that scene in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation when the Griswold family tramps through snow to find the perfect Christmas tree? Mishaps aside, the scene illustrates the tradition that Tasmanian couple Natalie and Jared Mendham fell in love with during their years living in Canada.
“In Vancouver each Christmas we made a tradition of getting a tree from one of the farms out in the country,” Natalie says. “It’s such a big deal over there and it’s really quite cool, their ideas are really well-developed. They’ve got little petting zoos and Santa comes.”
When they returned home the Mendhams were determined to introduce Tasmanians to the full spirit of the Christmas tree outing. They took over a section of Jared’s parents’ farm at Richmond and planted 2000 trees. Last year, they had a low-key open weekend when people could visit and select a tree, but this year they are going all out, opening each weekend this month until Christmas (for details, go to facebook.com/richmondxmastreefarm).
Natalie, a photographer, says she and Jared were keen to start their own business but had no desire to pursue a fully-fledged career in farming. Jared works full-time in digital marketing with Destination Southern Tasmania, while Natalie works freelance and cares for their five-year-old twins Jack and Alex.
“We wanted to do something with our land, but something no one else was doing,” Natalie explains. “We’re not hard-core agricultural people, we’re more into business development and marketing and this is something that can be public-facing.”
If this year is a success, the couple plans to further develop the Tasmanian tree-getting experience. “We’re thinking about doing a hay ride in the future and I’m thinking about dressing my dad up in a Santa suit,” Natalie says. “He doesn’t know that yet.”
The horns of Plenty
The steep, rocky slopes of Bec Lynd’s Derwent Valley property cause no concern for the sturdy hoofs of her Highland cows. Their thick long-haired coats are perfect protection from the harsh winds that buffet this previously unused section of land at Plenty. When Lynd bought the land in 2010 it had neither fences nor driveway, having been written off as useless by neighbouring farmers.
Lynd’s hirsute cows are undeterred by the fallen trees and scrub that cover the land, simply shifting obstacles out of the way with their immense horns to access the tastiest grass. “They’ll even trample your bracken fern so I put them in areas I want to clean up. They’re almost like goats in that sense,” Lynd says of the cows who share the property with a small herd of Wessex saddleback pigs.
Lynd did not set out to be a rare-breed beef farmer. Having left Tasmania as a teenager she was dreaming of a return home while working as a paramedic in Darwin. She was keen for a property large enough for a couple of horses.
“I ended up with a 220-acre [89ha], absolutely picturesque property in the Derwent Valley,” she says. “It was too big to mow on a weekend so I figured I needed some livestock. Doing a lot of research I came across the Scottish Highland cattle. I got two of them and now I’ve got about 100.”
While they are excellent lawnmowers, their meat also tastes wonderful and Lynd and her partner Rebecca Tudor now breed them for Tasmanian restaurants.
“When I first tasted the meat I thought, ‘Wow, this is the way beef used to taste when I was a kid’,” Lynd says. The meat is served at proudly origin-aware eateries including Frank, Franklin, The Source, Stefano Lubiana’s Osteria and the Westend Pumphouse.
Assault on the senses
While Lynd’s farming career arose almost by accident from a need to manage the vegetation on her land, Londoner Alice Laing and her Tasmanian-born husband Sam Manson began with an idea. The property came second.
On a visit to Manson’s family in Launceston a few years ago the couple was struck by the absurdity of being in a state surrounded by pristine salty seas where the sea salt of choice for gourmet cooking was English brand Maldon, produced north-east of London.
In October 2013, they packed up their lives in London to test their theory that Tasmania would be the perfect place to set up a salt works.
“We went up and down the East Coast making salt from a saucepan, boiling off some seawater and checking how the salt tasted,” Laing says. “It was just delicious and bright white and clean tasting so we thought, ‘We’ve got to give it ago’. They called us the mad English salt couple.” (Manson had a suitably English accent after 11 years in London working as a lawyer for England’s Football Association.)
The East Coast farmers Laing and Manson approached about leasing some waterfront land were keen to help, despite finding the couple slightly mad.
“Eventually, we were put on to Bruce Dunbabin at Mayfield who said, ‘Yeah, let me show you where you can set up’,” Laing says.
Neither she nor Manson were mechanically minded so the nine months they spent setting up their solar-powered salt works at Kelvedon Beach sometimes felt like a farcical comedy about out-of-depth city slickers trying their luck at country living.
“When pieces of equipment broke down we’d be, ‘Oh gosh, what do we do?’ so the local farmers have saved our lives a million times over with so many problems,” Laing says.
“Even embarrassing things like getting our car ditched on a beach. We didn’t realise you can’t drive on the beach.”
A year on from the launch of Tasman Sea Salt, the couple’s idea seems less a romantic dream and more a sure-fire business plan.
“To be the only Tasmanian sea salt gives us a real point of difference and Tasmanians are so proud of Tasmanian produce so everyone has been incredibly supportive,” Laing says. “Almost all the top restaurants in Tassie are using the salt, you’ve got Ethos, The Source, Stillwater, Saffire, Franklin and lots of others.”
With baby daughter Flora in tow Laing and Manson are putting down roots, building a home at Swansea and looking to export to Asia. “It’s full-on, but that’s what we wanted and we love being part of every step of the process,” Laing says.
Wheel of fortune
A synergy between Tasmania’s restaurants and producers appears to be responsible for the new wave of local food heroes. It was perhaps Garagistes that most successfully drew national attention to the quality of Tasmania’s meat, seafood and vegetables and boosted demand for micro-scale farm produce. Similarly, Garagistes’ co-owner and chef Luke Burgess set a benchmark for food presentation, using exclusively crockery handcrafted by the potter father of his business partner Kirk Richardson.
Ben Richardson, a former surfboard maker, is a largely self-taught potter who formerly instructed in ceramics at the University of Tasmania Art School. Thanks in part to the enormous success of Garagistes, which closed in March, demand from restaurants and private customers for his work has exploded.
“Garagistes was like having a private gallery where people could see your work used creatively,” Richardson says in his picturesque glass-walled studio overlooking Pipeclay Lagoon.
Outside, two cavernous hand-built kilns are ready to be filled with pots and stoked with firewood sourced from the Sandford property. Richardson’s wife and business partner Peta is busy glazing a set of his plates as Radio National murmurs away in the background.
It is from Pipeclay Lagoon and surrounding beaches that Richardson pulls some of the clay used in his distinctive plates and pots. By necessity he is forced to use commercial clay for restaurant commissions to keep up with demand, but for local businesses he incorporates local elements.
The Agrarian Kitchen’s plates were made using local Derwent Valley sandstone and a series for Bruny Island Cheese Company features a red ochre clay sourced literally across the road from the cheesery. Shells and rocks from local beaches are crushed into glazes and found items like rope are used for pattern making.
Richardson calls it “terroirism”, stealing the proud notion of terroir (the characteristics of soil, climate and terrain of a place) from Australia’s winemakers. He prefers to sell his works direct, rather than via a gallery.
“By selling direct we can keep the prices reasonable and it makes sense here,” Richardson says. “It doesn’t make as much sense in a shop or gallery, where I can’t point to the rocks out there and say, ‘I crush those and melt them to make glazes’.”
When Richardson began Ridgeline Pottery in the 1980s few people cared about the origin of their food, or their plates, he says. To highlight how dramatically this has changed Peta tells the story of a honeymooning couple from interstate who recently visited the studio after a week at the Saffire resort near Coles Bay.
“At Saffire they had eaten from Ben’s plates every day for a week and they wanted to see where they were made,” she says.
“They had eaten some honey and met the honey producer, they had wine and met the winemaker and they had been to a cherry farm. They were just gobsmacked by Tasmania.”
From little things big things grow
After five years at the forefront of Tasmania’s small-producer movement, Paulette Whitney knows more than most how challenging it is to establish and maintain markets for niche products. “People romanticise what we do,” Whitney says when TasWeekend finally manages to tie her to one spot long enough for an interview.
When she and her partner Matt Deakin, a former chef, are not tending the flowers, herbs and other edible plants on their property at Neika, they are selling their goods at farmers markets, packing, networking, invoicing and generally chasing their tails.
“I think people imagine us swanning about picking things in the sunshine, when more often we’re wet, cold, muddy or hot and weeding, fixing irrigation or racing to get things planted before meeting the school bus,” Whitney says.
Their 10-year-old daughter Elsie is following in her parents’ path, raising a clutch of quail to produce eggs, which she sells for pocket money. Elsie stamps and packages the eggs herself. “She is supposed to keep a ledger of income and expenses but she prioritises cuddling, picking chickweed and giving them buckets of soil for dust bathing over the economic lesson we’d planned to teach,” Whitney says.
Hatching a plan
On a much larger scale, but still in the niche category, Bruce Wiggins at Nubeena supplies up to 7000 of his Rannoch Farm quail a week to restaurants and gourmet food stores nationally. But Wiggins has had to pull the pin on supplying quail eggs to local restaurants.
Unlike Elsie with her little fingers, he cannot justify stamping each tiny speckled egg nor the extra fees and paperwork required under new laws, which came into effect in February. “Before the new laws I could supply the eggs but it was more a service to the restaurants who wanted them for hors d’oeuvres and salads, I didn’t make much money from it,” Wiggins says.
Like Whitney and Deakin, Wiggins has some sage advice – and a warning – to novice producers looking to start up a niche market.
“It makes you go grey earlier,” Wiggins says with a laugh, pointing out that each piece of equipment for his hatchery and processing plant must be made from scratch or modified from chicken farming equipment. His best advice is “never compromise”.
“It’s easy to come under pressure, but at the end of the day if you don’t compromise and keep the quality it pays off in the long run,” he says. “If someone tells you the price is too high, say, ‘Fine, don’t buy it’.”
Whitney agrees the biggest challenge in selling unusual products is achieving a price that reflects the time and effort taken to grow, package and deliver. “Maintaining quality and the administration required to list, pick, pack and invoice up to 40 different products a week is pretty inefficient when compared to selling larger quantities of mainstream produce,” Whitney says.
It is the feedback from customers that makes the work enjoyable and therefore sustainable, she says. “We really value the support of the people who eat the food we grow. Their positive feedback makes numb fingers completely worthwhile.”
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