Farmer of the Year finalist Nick Arena is standing in his “Cookabarra Restaurant” waiting for two busloads of people, one from a school and another from an aged care facility when he speaks with The Land.
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Mr Arena owns the largest Barramundi farm in NSW.
“It surprises a lot of people to know that about 70 per cent of the Barramundi sold in Australia is imported, frozen product.
“It’s mostly sourced from Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan,” he said. The fact of the matter is, although it’s an iconic Australian breed of fish, it does occur naturally through the warm, tropical waters of South East Asia also. “It also surprises people to find we grow them indoors, in tanks, there are some breeders up north growing in outdoor ponds,” he said. Mr Arena said setting up a suitable growing environment for Barramundi at Port Stephens involved innovation in use of the sun’s solar energy. “That helps us to cut costs, but it doesn’t stop just there.
“We’ve effectively eliminated the electricity bill, which covers heating and filtration, but we also use the wastewater from the tanks.
“That’s used in a hydroponics system to grow lettuce on site,” he said.
And both products are used directly at the Cookabarra Restaurant.
“We’re using about 20 per cent of our product on site at the restaurant,” he said.
“Ideally we’d like to see 100 per cent used on site.”
He said thanks to the internet a lot more farmers were today selling direct to consumers and he felt that was the way to go in the future.
“We’ve got to put pressure on the big supermarkets who make it hard for farmers to make a decent dollar,” he said. “There’s local supermarkets here that we don’t supply, because if we did we’d go broke. “They just won’t pay you a decent price.”
He said he didn’t think people from the cities understood the constant pressure farmers operated under.
“Look I’m born and bred in the city myself, but the tours go some way to educating city people about where their food comes from.
“We’re constantly trying to educate people, otherwise they’ll remain oblivious.”
As a result, at the Cookabarra Restaurant there are two tours a day, one at 11am and another at 2pm.
In the warmer summer months people can feed Barramundi and in the colder months Rainbow Trout. It’s all part of teaching people where their food comes from. Mr Arena said soon he would open a value-adding centre on site that would sell retail food to tour groups and open up new markets for local producers.
“Even filleting for us is value-adding, but at the moment we’re doing that in a commercial kitchen, we’ve built a value-adding centre on site, but it’s not quite yet operational.
“We’re hoping to sell fresh fish, prawns, oysters, fresh vegetables and even some food for the barbie, it will be great for the region and great for local producers,” said Mr Arena. In 1440 square metres of tanks Mr Arena currently produces 1000 kilograms of fresh fish a week, or about 50 tonnes a year.
Most of it goes to Sydney’s live markets.
The NSW Farmer of the Year Award is designed to recognise excellence in farming within NSW. It is a joint initiative by NSW Farmers and NSW Primary Industries Department, and supported by The Land and SafeWork NSW.
