Right now the price of sweet potatoes has plunged with prices half what they were last year, thanks to a push from new Bundaberg growers.
Red soil farmers at Cudgen, near Tweed Heads, are taking calls from agents telling them not to send to market. But this is the lesser of worries on the Paddon family farm. There are bigger issues on the immediate horizon.
“Market variability is something we work with,” says fourth generation Tweed Valley farmer Jim Paddon, whose father, Doug, started growing sweet potatoes 40 years ago. It’s a crop that more than pays its way in the long-run, provided there remains good soil in which to grow them. “What we can’t stomach,” he says. “is the loss of prime farmland.”
An imminent plan to build a new hospital on 16ha of red basalt krasnozem – essentially prime potato country on part of a small lense of the best North Coast soil – has enraged this very viable agricultural community, where the average age of a farmer is below 50.
The Paddon family sees encroaching development as the thin edge of a destructive wedge that will open the limited farming country to associated private health facilities, aged care homes and housing subdivision.
Meanwhile there is already a hospital at nearby Tweed Heads, and Murwillumbah, and two dozen other localities that can be considered – including a block of sandy paddocks just down the road.
A development application is expected to go on display shortly, giving residents just 28 days to make a comment. There is every chance the block of cultivated land will be acquisitioned by government so the need to act is now, says Jim’s wife Hayley who has taken to the streets of Tweed Heads, doorknocking and talking to residents about the future of farming – and health – on the Tweed.
“I’ve had older women cry on my shoulder worried that they will lose health facilities in Tweed Heads where there is public transport,” she said. “Not only do they want to see farming stay but they don’t want to lose healthcare in town.”
A Facebook page campaigning against the state government’s directive has generated 3400 members with an average of two new users signing up every day. There are another 5000 signatures through digital protest platform GetUp! Lending more weight to the argument are 4000 individual letters of support for local food, and shortened food miles in preference to a new greensite hospital.
Mrs Paddon has distributed a 92,000 letter drop and door knocked 100 people on the Tweed during the second week of the July school holidays, when she had a bit of free time, resulting in 99 signatures in favour of future farmland at Cudgen.
Join the fight online
Support from the establishment seems rather limited, with sitting Nationals State member Geoff Provost deferring, as does Primary Industries minister Niall Blair, to health minister Brad Hazzard, who has apparently had his red lights flashing.
A recent visit to the Tweed resulted in him berating those in opposition to the hospital plan with babbling nonsense. “He was like a drunken uncle at a wedding,” said Mrs Paddon, who is so fed up with political inaction for farmers that she may run as an independent in next year’s state election.
