There’s a healthy variety of farms on Melbourne’s fringe where the fresh and fragrant are carefully harvested by hand. Sarah Harris reports.TRULY, there are worse things than being kept in the dark and treated like a mushroom. “It’s actually quite scientific, with computers monitoring everything in the room to ensure conditions are perfect for them,” Justin Milne says of the business of fungi production. “Anyone can grow a mushroom, but when you are producing 10 tonnes a week every little variation in temperature, moisture and carbon dioxide levels counts.”
After potatoes, mushrooms are the most valuable fresh vegetable crop grown in Australia, but most consumers remain in the dark about where they come from ... a dead-end road in Diggers Rest as it transpires.
For 25 years Bulla Mushrooms has been producing the familiar white buttons, cups and flats of the Agaricus bisporus variety that dominate supermarket and greengrocers’ shelves in Australia.
It is a market that has quite literally mushroomed, with annual per capita consumption increasing from 0.6kg in the late ’70s to 3.2kg today.
It takes two weeks from “casing day”, when the peat moss is laid over pasteurised beds of compost colonised with mushroom spawn in one of the nine growing rooms, for the first “pins” to appear.
From pinning they double in size every 24 hours, taking just four days to grow to a large flat. In the days between the pickers, working on ladders between tiered beds, will be occupied in earnest.
“Sometimes they will go through a room in the morning and say that’s it, but late in the afternoon we have to go back in because they have grown so quickly,” Milne, general manager of Bulla Mushrooms, reveals.
“Experienced pickers might have four or five boxes on the go at once. A good picker will pick up four mushrooms at a time in one hand, just slice them at once. If they are picking flats they could be doing anywhere between 25 and 30 boxes or 90 to 100kg an hour.”
Some of the Bulla mushrooms will inevitably end up being tossed with leafy salad greens produced by Bacchus Marsh-based Tripod Farms.
Over 23 years Tripod has grown from a small family holding of six hectares to one of Moorabool’s biggest employers with a workforce of about 250 people producing an average of 50 tonnes of salad greens a week from 325 hectares (a combination of owned and leased land mostly round Bacchus Marsh but including several farms in Werribee and Gippsland).
But in spite of its size, it remains very much a family business, with third generation farmers Frank and Joe Ruffo and their wives Angela and Carmel running the show and three sons already working in the business, ensuring succession of a fourth.
The family’s state-of the-art factory in Bacchus Marsh’s famed Avenue is the hub of operations. From here baby cos, spinach, rocket, wasabi and various mixes also, including mizuna, tatsoi, chard, beets, mustard, coral, green coral, radiccio, minuet, green oak, red baby cos, red leg, red oak and red velvet, are dispatched to supermarkets and produce markets across Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand.
“Our company is totally integrated, we have full control of the chain,” Ruffo explains. “We seed, plant, grow, harvest, wash, pack, sell and distribute all within the company. That way if anything goes wrong it is all our own fault.
“There are probably about three other companies in Australia that do what we do.”
As the pickers are hand-cutting along the rows, refrigerated Tripod trucks are constantly lapping the fields picking up pallets and delivering them to the factory where the greens are washed, packed and out the door the same day.
“This is what gives us the advantage and ensures our quality, “ Ruffo explains. “If it sits for even an hour in a field on a hot day if costs half a day’s shelf life.”
Nothing is left to chance. Tripod even has its own maintenance crews so it never has to worry about breakdowns costing orders.
“Some of the systems we have in place are recognised all over the world in terms of efficiencies. The only thing that really throws us out of whack is the weather, which can vary even between farm sites here in Bacchus Marsh.
“In The Avenue here is is slightly cooler than out at, say, Lawson Road. So we try to select what performs the best for each site.
“The reason for that is there is no room for error. The profit margin is minimal and you have a lot of turnover, so if you make one mistake you could be working for six to 12 months to recoup that.”
Farming on any scale is a labour of love, but perhaps no more so than on a rose farm around Valentine’s Day when there are 30,000 long-stems to be picked.
Romsey Rose Farm was just a bare sheep paddock when horticulturist Kevin Fitzgerald and his wife Dianne bought the property 18 years ago.
Today it is a fragrant oasis of 20,000 rose plants, about 65 per cent of which are housed in two huge briquette-heated greenhouses that are productive year-round. The Fitzgeralds are among the few commercial rose growers in Australia still growing in soil rather than producing hydroponically.
“They are picked 365 days,” Dianne reveals. “Even Christmas Day you still pick. We come out at daybreak and fly through as fast as we can.
“It is a matter of walking down, looking at what stage of openness the roses are at and knowing when they need to be picked. They are all very different. Some varieties open up a lot quicker than others.
“What we grow is fashion-dictated. When we started creams and pastels were more popular, then the brighter colours came in.
“Every year they bring out new roses and of course all the florists like to have the new varieties. But you can never have enough red.”
While about 40 per cent of the roses are red at the Fitzgeralds’ flower farm in the Macedon Ranges, it’s lavender blue over at Mt Egerton.
What Edythe Anderson and Rosemary Holmes don’t know about lavender, probably isn’t worth knowing.
But back in the ’80s when the two hit on the idea to grow the fragrant drought-hardy plant, lavender was not fashionable.
“We saw a postcard featuring lavender and discovered you didn’t have to water it. That was what kicked it off,” Anderson reveals.
The two nursing colleagues pioneered the lavender industry on mainland Australia and hold the Royal Botanic Gardens National Collection of 122 varieties of lavender including two developed at their Yuulong Lavender Estate: the Yuulong and the Mt Egerton Blue.
The shop on the estate, which attracts busloads of tourists, offers a range of more than 40 lavender-inspired products ranging from chocolates, biscuits, body lotions, jams, soaps, scents, oils and heat packs through to deodorant, furniture polish and pet shampoo.
The duo helped set up the Australian Lavender Growers Association, the seed of a fragrant industry which has seen lavender farms blossom across the country and the growth of “lavender trail” tourism.
And, so on farming diversity grows.
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