BRENDEN May remembers well his summer school holidays at Forest Reefs – work aplenty.
Mum and dad grew zucchinis, pumpkins, potatoes and peas on 40 hectares for shipping to Sydney markets, and the whole family pitched in during harvest.
“The only thing harder than peas and potatoes by hand is shearing,” says Brenden.
He spent some time off farm in his early 20s in Sydney working as a physical education teacher.
For the rich basalt country around the once-volcanic Mt Canobolas this horticultural theme is common - farmers grew potatoes, and peas in summer.
The march of lifestyle blocks across the Central Tablelands is changing the nature not only of farming, but society.
Brenden is among the last vegetable growers in Forest Reefs, other than those with home gardens that are sometimes significant.
He does most things himself and these days sticks to growing only potatoes. He’s contracted to supply crisping variety potatoes – mainly Atlantic and Snowden – to Snack Brands annually.
Snack Brands creates the Natural Chip Co, Kettle Chips and Samboy brands, among others.
The crisping poptatoes have high specific gravity, and a dry matter content greater than other potato strains, meaning not as much water evaporates from them.
It takes about 26 tonnes of potatoes to make 13 tonnes of chips.
So in a good year, when Brenden fullfills his maximum contract designation, about 450 tonnes of potato crisps are produced from his property.
He speaks of side dressing the potatoes he has in, the recent weather means the spuds are in a holding pattern rather than flourishing.
He’s already committed 300 kilograms of high analysis fertilser per 0.4ha at planting and will be looking at another 300kg of side dressing applied gradually every one to two weeks, depending on how the crop is faring.
He uses about two megaltires of water to the hectare, but will then crop 40 to 50 tonnes to the hectare, from his initial investment of about four tonnes of seed potatoes to the hectare.
When people pay a million dollars for their slice of tranquility on a small holding, a diesel irrigation pump in the night – the most effective time to irrigate – receives short shrift.
Expansion is not really an option because of the value transfer from small holdings to larger ones sends land prices beyond the realm of realistic return in a lifetime from its income potential.
“The bankers look like you’re an alien if farming is your only income,” he says.
From his home near the top of a ridge Brenden looks across neighbouring blocks and relates how much they have historically sold for and how much they’d sell for now.
It’s Saturday night and we are watching the sun go down over a 65-megalitre dam from the boathouse of what farm owner Duncan Klowes describes as the “oil painting of my life”.
Just four kilometres from Millthorpe, it’s anyone’s guess just how much his 1200-plus hectares is worth.
Duncan’s mate Ian “Hoss” McRae chucks in a line, but reckons he’s got the wrong lure to hook one of the 1000-plus rainbow or brown trout in the dam.
Hoss’s 106-hectare “Rockville Farm” is about five kilometres east of Millthorpe and Hoss was born about the time kerosene-driven tractors that had been level-pegging with horses gave out to petrol-driven Ferguson TEA-20s.
“Every farm grew potatoes and peas, and the bigger holdings had one or two permanent employees,” he said.
“Every day, barring Friday and Saturday, there was a freight train from Millthorpe in the 50s that took produce from farms around Shadforth, Vittoria, Beneree, Tallwood and Guyong to Sydney’s Flemington Markets.”
Each of the train stations in the area, Orange, Millthorpe, Spring Hill, Blayney and Bathurst had holding yards for livestock and cattle and sheep regularly rode the rails to Homebush. “The rail system was a well-oiled machine,” says Hoss.
The Central West Express, hauled by 38 Series steam locomotives, plied the lines daily to and from Sydney and there were few trucks on the roads.
The rail system was maintained by “gangers”, mostly Polish, German and Dutch immigrants, which meant permanent low-paid work.
Hoss said his father put down 8ha of potatoes every year and when it was time to harvest he’d simply go to the pubs in Millthorpe and ask around the itinerant workers who was up for a couple of weeks’ work.
Hoss puts the break up of the farms down to the fact Australian farmers are still “price takers, not price makers”, and the fact there’s “no brotherhood of the industry”.
Then the big farm of the district was “Valdemar”, where we’re now sitting, once part of the “Limestone Run” and today owned by Duncan.
On Sunday morning Dave Parfett, who owns “Mallowgrove” and works an area including “Mundara”, explains over coffee at Millthorpe’s Providore in a more pragmatic manner Hoss’s theory of why big farms get broken up.
“Woolworths are looking at a 40 to 70 per cent return on capital and farmers might barely manage 2pc, they’re sometimes forced into subdivision,” he says.
He says to be an investment comparable with the bond market there must be a 5-6pc return and to be able to pay competitive wages farmers need a bigger return than 2pc.
He said a simple shift by major retailers, such as altering payment of accounts from 30 to 90 days can tilt a farm’s viability.
“Yes the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is supposed to step in but the argument becomes so bogged down in theoretical legalities it’s like turning around the Titanic,” he says.
As potato farmer Brenden speaks with The Land it’s coming up to dark on Friday night, and he still has to get back into a paddock to spray.
“It’s hard and it always has been, and I’m not sure why it has to be that way, but it is,” he says.
Then it’s back on the tractor.