George, Anne and Adam Bremner maintain that with careful paddock selection, a three year rotation and meticulous attention to weed control, high yields are possible.
Bremners were planning to sow 10 acres, double the previous year’s planting.
Grown in the carrot rotation, they assist with weed control and provide income after only two months.
“We have always grown Mojo and Kamaray carrots for their sweet juiciness. Mojos are grown early in the season because their delicate, tender top can be damaged by frost, making them impossible to harvest mechanically. So for the latter part of the season, we grow the stronger topped Kamaram.”
Beets, carrots and parsnip are planted on raised beds using an air seeder for precision sowing.
A rotary hoe is used to prepare the fine seedbed.
Dams and two small bores provide irrigation water to supplement rainfall.
Anne says they have never run short of water, even through the drought.
“Irrigation pipes are laid down after the potatoes are hilled up and remain in situ over the growing season.
“Travelling irrigators are used if paddocks need additional moisture before the beds are moulded.”
A wet winter can pose a problem. The Bremners make an all-out effort to get the crops off and into their purpose built coolrooms before the paddocks become too boggy in late July.
They try to avoid driving machinery on wet soil.
George, Anne and Adam maintain that with careful paddock selection, a three-year rotation and meticulous attention to weed control, high yields are possible.
“It’s nothing to grow a potato crop of 25 tonnes to the acre so I suppose an average over the whole farm, by the time you graded them, would be 15 tonnes or a bit more.
“I would say that our organic crops are comparable to conventional crop yields,” says Anne.
Paddocks are rested for three years before root crops are introduced again.
A green manure crop of rapeseed, rye corn and oats is sown. The oats and rape are included for their fumigant properties, as a disease break.
A few sheep are run to graze the fallow paddocks. Even though the soils are inherently fertile, Adam pays particular attention to soil nutrition.
“I actually manufacture my own fertiliser, because I can’t find an off-theshelf fertiliser that’s going to do the same job.
“It’s very difficult to get high analysis nitrogen and phosphorus fertilisers. Potassium is expensive, but you can get the product. But nitrogen and phosphorus is basically animal derived and you have to have large volumes in order to get the required nutrient that you’re after.
“I do extensive soil tests and build up the nutrients in the soil with allowable inputs in a form that will go through conventional machinery,” says Adam.
Weed control is the Bremners’ major challenge. Even though operations are mechanised, additional hand weeding is needed.
“The bottom line is you’ve got to hand weed between all the little carrot and parsnip seedlings,” says Anne.
“We look after our carrot and parsnip paddocks. We don’t ever let weeds go to seed in them.
“We have a machine that manually weeds between the rows and then we employ people to hand weed. We are fairly on top of it. You must weed at the right time or you get in serious trouble.”
‘In good fallow that’s been in pasture for four or five years, when you turn it in, you can see the white strands of fungi
through the grains of soil, it looks fresh, it falls apart really easily, it has been well rested’
- Adam Bremner
Adam says there’s a fine balance between having a beneficial fallow and creating a weed burden for the following crop.
“Clover is a big weed to us, but in our fallow ground it is a major beneficiary for the soil.
“You have to treat your fallow like a crop.
“But the problem is that while you are not really cropping it, you are not really fallowing it either.
“In good fallow that’s been in pasture for four or five years, when you turn it in, you can see the white strands of fungi through the grains of soil, it looks fresh, it falls apart really easily, it has been well rested.
“The biological systems are taking care of the soil and bringing it back into good condition.
“Potato paddocks can be fallowed well, but the carrot ground needs constant working and turning over to control weeds.
“The microorganisms can’t come back under those circumstances. Soil does get tired, even though you are ploughing green manure crops back into it.
“It’s definitely not the answer to long term organic sustainable farming. You really do have to fallow your ground properly,” he says.
The Bremners are trying flame weeding on the carrot beds as an alternative to working the soil.
In the potato crops, weeds can be controlled at several stages in the growth cycle.
At planting, harrows flatten the soil and kill the first flush of weeds.
Further harrowing is possible, until the potatoes are just emerging.
Later emerging weeds can be controlled when the bed-moulder is hilling up the potatoes.
Wages, fertiliser and fuel farm’s major input costs.
“Organic farming is labour intensive. Machinery wears out more quickly; you use a lot more fuel.
“It’s one of the interesting things about organics - people don’t like the idea that there’s more fuel being used, but the fact is, apart from hand weeding, there is no alternative,” says Adam. “To keep your weeds down you have to continually work the soil.”
“There is a heck of a lot of mechanisation,” agrees Anne. “We have about ten tractors of varying sizes and then there is the packaging side of it.
“For the carrots, you need a carrot harvester and then you need a washer and a polisher. You wouldn’t think you’d need all this for organics, but if you don’t, you can’t compete.
“Polishing just takes the very first thin layer of waxy skin off, so they look orange all the time.
“Otherwise when they dry, they get a more whitish look. It’s really only cosmetic and I’d rather not do it,” Anne says.
are
the
Organic certified and industry
certified seed
Pioneers in the organic industry, the Bremners were also the first to produce organic certified and industry certified seed. However they found it uneconomic to continue to produce it, as well as an extra burden on their already busy enterprise.
“The certifying bodies wanted to have organic farmers using organic seed, which is not just about the food being organic; it’s about the whole cycle being organic.
“But the problem is if you haven’t got enough organic seed, then people are allowed to use conventional seed.
“It’s not a level playing field,” says Adam.
“We are careful growers, so we thought we could do it,” says Anne.
“It actually took us three years to get there. But it fell through, because the certifiers didn’t enforce that growers had to buy certified seed and other growers weren’t prepared to pay for the higher production costs of organic seed.
“But we do use a lot of our own potato seed and every now and then we’ll bring in a new strain.”
Potatoes are clones but lose their true-to-type characteristics with each generation. Breeders bring them back to their original genetics through tissue culture.
A certified seed potato will be the fifth generation and can be grown for another three years before it will start to lose its genetic purity.
The Bremners worked with potato breeders at the Toolangi Potato Research Station to introduce an old variety of Desiree.
“We have the rights to it now; it’s a red potato with a very yellow flesh, a bit like a Dutch Cream.
“We had basically run out of them but a friend still had a few left so, through our seed breeding program and tissue culture we regenerated it into mini tubers.
“We’ve grown the old Desiree up now to the stage that, after five years, we’ve got enough seed to grow a commercial crop,” said Adam.
‘Organics is still a fairly small
market, so if we grow five acres more potatoes, there’s nowhere to sell them, because the market doesn’t exist’
- Adam
The Bremners sell to wholesale markets in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide, and occasionally Perth.
Potatoes are packed into 20kg jute bags and 15kg and 20kg cardboard boxes. Bulk potatoes are sent in onetonne bags.
“Potatoes are very like apples; they are extremely delicate and don’t like to be knocked around. Otway Reds and Pontiacs are particularly brittle; they’ll crack easily. We pack the delicate varieties in cardboard boxes,” says Anne.
Big players in the organic market they may be, the Bremners still face the same challenges of the conventional market. In addition, it is easy to saturate the market.
“Organics is still a fairly small market, so if we grow five acres more potatoes, there’s nowhere to sell them, because the market doesn’t exist,” says Adam. “We can lower the price our end, but the fact is people are not buying more, because the price is not coming down at the retail level.”
Processing represents 15 per cent of their turnover. Potatoes and beetroot are sold for crisping and this may extend to parsnip and carrot chips in the future.
Adam says that potatoes are very temperamental; they do not cook easily. As the temperature gets colder, potatoes tend to convert their starches into sugars. When potato chips are cooked the sugars tend to caramelise so that the surface darkens.
“They taste fine, but it’s considered cosmetically unacceptable.
“In Europe, there’s more tolerance and the chips are quite brown, whereas in Australia they have to be as white as a sheet of paper.
“Processing can be a fickle market. We have had to sell our processing potatoes as one-off certified seed on the conventional market for next to nothing, even though we’ve borne all the costs of growing them organically, because the processors suddenly stopped production,” he says.
In potato farming, seed potatoes are grown for five generations before fresh seed is introduced.
Succession plan
Wombat Forest Organics are following the same pattern; Adam is the sixth generation Bremner to carry on the family legacy.
Anne says it was important to develop a farm succession plan. Theirs resulted in them restructuring the business, from a partnership to a family trust. “We were feeling a bit sad about having built up this good organic name and not having anyone to pass it onto, until Adam decided to come home.
“Adam has brought a lot to the farm - he’s young and vigorous and he’s looking after the soils properly, whereas we were just using them and not doing much about building them up.
“The farm is in good hands,” Anne says.