Greening the harvest
Frances and Jeff Michaels, pictured, founders and proprietors of organic supply company Green Harvest, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, chat to Tim Marshall on how they got started and what inspired them.
LIFE can be full of unexpected twists and turns, but they usually put us exactly where we’re meant to be. That was certainly the case for Jeff Michaels.
When Jeff left his home in the Pacific north-west of the USA to attend the 1989 Permaculture Convergence in New Zealand, he had quite a different life mapped out. His intention was to WOOF (Workers On Organic Farms) in Australia and visit the Crystal Waters Permaculture village near Maleny, Queensland.
His plans for this short- term visit to Australia were radically changed when he met Frances. A qualified horticulturist, Frances had been working as a Permaculture-inspired garden designer and teaching horticulture at TAFE. It wasn’t long before Jeff was using his landscaping experience to implement Frances’ designs, and learning about gardening in the subtropical conditions of southeastern Queensland. Shortly after that, he was working with Frances and Permaculture designer and engineer, Max Lindegger, as the admin person for their gardening and Permaculture courses.
An idea is born
Because they wanted to work from home, Jeff and Frances came up with the idea of a mail-order garden supply business. In those days, before the popular uptake of the Internet, this involved the production and distribution of a printed catalogue.
Because it was also before the current era of popular acceptance of organic growing methods and Permaculture, they were able to stock many gardening items that were (and sadly, many are still) hard to obtain in garden centres.
These products included hard- to-find tools, pest exclusion products (nets and fruit bags) and other organic pest control products - not just pesticides but also useful things such as non-drying glue, fruit fly lures, snail traps and more. Also, importantly, the catalogue contained seeds of hard- to-find vegetable varieties adapted to local and Australian conditions.
At that stage, the couple’s business, Green Harvest, was run from a shed and their dining room table! However,
Frances and Jeff then became early adopters of computer technology, opening their first website before most people knew what a website was.
Satisfy customer demands
From their teaching, they realised there was a significant opportunity in supplying a wide range of gardening inputs.
So often the students, when introduced to products such as soil pH kits and maximum-minimum thermometers, would ask, “Where can we get it?”
Jeff told Acres that they soon realised they needed to become ‘curators of products’, and Jeff used his USA contacts to bring new products into Australia. Soon they would be commissioning the manufacture of products to satisfy customer demands.
The website grew along with the size of the catalogue and became a sought-after resource of advice and notes from the gardening courses.
Eventually, they outgrew the backyard operation and moved the business into Maleny a few years ago, where they built a 500- square-metre rammed earth building on a one- acre site.
In the design of the new shop, warehouse and teaching venue, they were able to demonstrate ways to reduce the carbon load of a building, reduce and recycle waste from their 23-employee business onsite and showcase an edible landscape for a commercial business.
In doing so they quickly converted a sceptical local government to an enthusiastic supporter, and the building became an example of sustainable development.
Green Harvest is now much more than a catalogue supplier of tools and garden gadgets. It is an important retailer of information (courses, books and website notes on solving garden problems) and seeds and seedlings of unusual and climate-adapted food plants.
The business specialises in the hot and humid climates that are not well- served by other retailers, who are mainly based in the temperate zone.
Biosecurity arrangements
The issue of availability of organic seeds has been occupying Frances, because the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources is reviewing its biosecurity arrangements for the import of Apiaceae (carrot, celery, parsley), Brassicaceae (cauliflower, cabbage), Cucurbitaceae (cucumber, gourd, melon) and Solanaceae (capsicum, eggplant, tomato) seed.
The Australian organic industry is very reliant on the import of (especially) brassica seed, there being few Australian producers, and many growers are concerned that they will be unable to use seed if the Department requires that they are treated with systemic fungicides.
Because there are few sources of organically grown seed (Green Harvest is always keen to locate new growers), certified organic growers can often obtain a ‘derogation’ from their certifier to use non-organic seed.
Often this seed is stored under inert gas (nitrogen or carbon dioxide) and is not treated with fungicides until removed from storage.
Organic growers can either order seed without treatment (many seed companies are happy to comply) or can wash off the surface-applied fungicide, disposing of the wash water in a non- growing area such as a hedgerow or windbreak. Systemic fungicide cannot be washed off.
Alternatively, growers will sometimes receive a derogation to ‘grow-out’ the non-organic seed (i.e. grow the first generation of non-organic material and save the seed).
The possibility that biosecurity rules will demand systemic treatment threatens organic growers with the additional complication of having to save their own seed (sometimes easy, but for some crops difficult and really an entirely different enterprise).
Frances also points out that there are burgeoning seedsprouting and micro- greens industries that use untreated seed, and that seed destined for human consumption will require some form of exemption from the proposed legislation. ☐