11 minute read
Growing together
BY RENEE CLUFF
Collaboration is key for Cairns district cane growers John and Desley Ferrando.
Farming sugarcane in Queensland might easily be viewed as a solitary, individualistic pursuit. However, Deputy Chair of CANEGROWERS Cairns, John Ferrando, recognises and fosters the benefits of collaboration: everything from employing varying perspectives to problem-solve, to sharing skills, knowledge, workloads and financial burdens, to boosting moods and morale.
John’s alliances are many. First and foremost is his marriage with wife Desley, followed closely by relationships with other family members, fellow growers and industry stakeholders.
“Any project that’s going, I will stick my hand up because it’s a learning opportunity”
“Any field day, any shed meeting –you’ll always take something from it. My father was the same.”
In fact, John’s philosophy is wellingrained in his line of ancestors. His grandfather, Giuseppe, arrived in the Gordonvale area from northern Italy in 1938 with his wife and nineyear-old son, Peter – John’s father.
Within a couple of years, Giuseppe, together with a friend, had bought his first parcel of land, and thereafter spent many years of back-breaking work clearing more land and building drains with shovels.
“If you went in with four blokes, only a quarter of it was your debt,” John explained. “They trusted each other, and they all ended up with a small farm. They knew how to work hard and Australia was treating them really well. They could make a good living, put money away, it was a safe place to live – all the boxes were ticked.
“My grandfather had no plans to return to Italy – four of his brothers fought in the Italian Army – but he’d seen the writing on the wall under (Fascist Party dictator) Mussolini.”
Back in Australia during WWII, Giuseppe was interned by authorities, even though by then he’d held Australian citizenship for years. This forced his son Peter to leave school early to help keep the farm running. Peter became a voracious reader, hell-bent on providing his own education through books.
Perhaps it’s because of this experience, or despite it, that he was passionate about embracing the culture of his new country, while still honouring his ancestry.
Peter eventually took over the operation and moved into a house on the home farm at Mount Peter. It’s the same house John has now been living in for 66 years.
In his early days of farming with his father, John was provided the ability to contribute in a meaningful way and was even given a 10-acre block of land to try harvesting the cane green to leave trash blankets. The harvesters of the time had been designed to cut burnt cane.
“I worked with the harvesting contractor and the first year went well, so I asked if I could cut it green again and Dad said, ‘Yeah it’s your block, do what you want to do with it’.
“And then later, up in the shed he asked if I thought the harvester could cut any more paddocks and I said, ‘Yes if it’s the same variety’. And Dad said, ‘Well if he can do a couple more, I reckon we should give it another shot’.
“Within two years, we were half trash blanket on this farm. The old man could see in the dry country, we needed to keep the moisture in, it was working.”
That trust and respect between father and son went both ways. Prior to his death in 2003, Peter had mentioned he’d like to investigate an alternative to burning trash blankets on fallow and replant blocks. John took up the investigation and after many years of trial and error, he now incorporates the trash on every block and has been doing so for over a decade.
John’s wife, Desley, shares his principles when it comes to collaboration. She is a fourth-generation cane grower, from a line of Johnson matriarchs who were also heavily invested and involved in farming.
“My great grandmother was at the first ever Mulgrave Mill meeting in 1896,” Desley marvelled. “It was pretty impressive for a woman of that era to be at that meeting.
“She and my great grandfather had quite a few struggles, they went through devastation of crops and property losses and many other things, but they always re-established.
“We are eternally grateful to our parents, grandparents and great grandparents. We acknowledge the hard work they’ve all done to enable us to farm today. We talk in our family about how we feel like we are stewards, and we share by story almost like indigenous culture. We have that connectedness to the land and family and an appreciation of those ties.
“The thing I’m really proud of is that our family has always supported BSES (the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations) and then SRA (Sugar Research Australia) with trial plots and other assessments on our farm. My grandfather had the view that you always give back to the industry, it was equally important with my mum and dad and now for us.
“It’s important for us to leave something for the next generation”
John and Desley have known each other virtually their whole lives, with Desley’s family farming on a neighbouring property to John’s. They became an item when they both joined the junior Lions Club, contributing to community service in a social setting.
The early years of their marriage, particularly when their children were young, cemented their partnership. John becomes emotional as he talks about the months of not seeing his babies when he was rising for work before they were awake, and not returning home until they were asleep. He was grateful that Desley had grown up in a farming family and understood the challenges.
“We used to know that once the planting and the season started, that was it, once we went to continuous crush that made it even harder,” Desley said. “My job was to keep everything going at home and his job was to keep the farm going and the team approach worked.
“We would go and have a picnic with John on a Sunday afternoon as though it was some great adventure. The children still remember those days with fondness and today, there’s a patience within the family. Everyone is accepting of what needs to be done.”
Desley is responsible for day-to-day management of the farm, the finances, accounts and legal work and other critical tasks such as environmental management plans and development plans. She’s also sometimes a pilot driver and technology investigator.
“Together we feel we make a good team,” Desley said. “It’s a board meeting every night at the dinner table. Without one or the other we have a risk and how do we succession plan for that? We hope we’ve done a good job of it.”
Desley also has a managerial government job outside of the farm and is grateful for John’s enduring support in allowing her to pursue a separate career. John is also proud of the paths his children, Toni and Kristi, have forged as an environmental engineer and jewellery entrepreneur respectively.
“He’s such a great supporter of all of us,” Desley said. “I went back to work with the purpose of supporting the girls financially while they pursued their educational paths. Then work got exciting and I received some great opportunities.
“He was so supportive, he said, ‘This is your time, this is for you’. He’s always been my biggest supporter, and I always feel really humbled and appreciative of that. He encourages us to be what we want to be, and he encourages us all to keep learning.”
The three farms John and Desley manage encompass 450 acres which produce around 15,000-tonnes of cane each year. They are distributed across the landscape, with the ‘bottom’ farm on heavy clays and black sand, the middle being the highly productive ‘golden mile’ and the third on rocky, hilly, dry country.
“We manage three different rainfall areas, three different soil types, it’s been a big learning curve because most of the equipment will work on two of the farms, but not on the third, which is also where we’ve got to conserve moisture constantly,” John explained. “In the other areas, you’re laser levelling for better drainage.”
A wetland has now improved drainage and water quality runoff on the lower farm, a project prompted and led by engineer daughter Toni. Creek banks were re-vegetated more than 20 years ago, and John – with a little help from his friends – figured out how to cathedral cut trees to ensure headlands remain intact and branches don’t encroach on harvesters.
“We just give the trees a haircut now every couple of years,” he said. “It’s not only saving washouts and improving water quality, but it’s keeping invasive grasses and other weeds out, which stops the rats that love grasses.”
The soaring cost of equipment, particularly since COVID-19 lockdowns, is a major challenge
“A lot of contractors are getting older, and with the rising price of equipment, there’s not enough in the returns for one grower to manage,” he said.
“But if a cooperative got together and bought it, it’s viable. You just need to find the right people to work with and have a watertight set of rules.”
John is already involved in a collaborative approach to farming with his planting and harvesting contractor, which he said has worked well for years. “It’s the only way we’re going to go anywhere,” he said.
“If we’re all going to stay in this game, I feel we need to look at it differently by working together.”
In recent years, growers have benefitted from the use of a CANEGROWERSowned precision planter to get fallow crops into the ground. It’s required for certain seeds, such as those of sunn hemp, which is growing in popularity off the back of trials carried out by one of his fellow directors, Neil Maitland.
“SRA have been investigating the trials and they’ve so far found the nitrogen you get from sunn hemp is very, very good,” John said. “Early indications show a decreased requirement for applied nitrogen and the organic carbon changed from 0.4 to about 0.6.
“That crop is now at first ratoon and they’re going to keep investigating right through ‘til its final stage.
“200 hectares of hemp are now going in around the Mulgrave District but it has very fine seed, so it takes a more precision planter to put it in the ground. CANEGROWERS Cairns region owns a precision planter, and it gets handed around to people who want to use it and it’s starting to get very busy. SRA’s research has been crucial to that take-up.
“A planter like that costs around $47,000 and the smaller growers can’t afford that to leave it in the shed except for one-and-a-half days a year.”
He rues the fact that machinery manufacturers no longer collaborate with growers. John said when local harvesters began cutting green, Toft would send a machine up with all the required modifications.
“Whoever bought a new machine that year got all the new modifications with the proviso that they might need their old harvester on hand while they’re playing around with the new one –even though the old one has been traded in,” he said. “They’d provide their feedback to Toft and the next year, they’d modify again.
“We don’t get that now. Nobody has a say on modifications they’d like to see.”
As a director of both CANEGROWERS Cairns and the Mulgrave Productivity Board, John is a passionate advocate for his fellow growers. When it comes to his own farms, he displays the same selflessness.
“Every farmer has pride in his farm,” he said. “The more you can do the right thing, the more of a legacy you can leave behind.
“That’s all we’ve ever wanted to do here: leave a legacy. Hopefully I’ll get another generation that wants to come through but if not, they might want to lease out the land. There are some good opportunities.”
