Max & Mark.
Ask the farmer what their cost is for pollination to work the sums back from there. Suggested as no operator
is going to disclose their baseline margins, not even to the ATO. [smile]
A short anecdote around investment for growth, directly pollination related?
Having been around perishable crop farming in NQ since the days we banged pine crates together
(nailed) on weekends just for fun, as a forced break from school, I can say there was a time where through
sheer isolation growing perishables was a life of hard knocks with a very small trickle into a market far
away, fed by steel caboose style wagons on very slow trains.
I remember well sitting waiting in the station master's office with Dad to get the "weigh ticket", the steam
locomotive huffing it's way past off the siding with our wagon of banana in tow. The station master's cat
being our entertainment as young boys are wont to do.
We in NQ could grow pretty much anything of the then popular fruits in the big cities, just could not get
the produce there or trying as Dad did it often rotted on a siding somewhere South.
It was around 1975/6 an older cashed up canefarmer come melon grower bought into a small fleet of then
very fast refrigerated semitrailers, and he setout many acres of a new to us vine crop, rockmelon. With our
help in supplying bees his cropping grew to where his whole farming practice turned to rockies, and with
the trucking link others (locally) jumped on board using his supply chain. The market then grew as supply
became a loose guarantee and today supports a few hundred perishable crop growers along some 200kms
of the coast highway moving thousands of tons of tomato/melon/capsicum/beans/pumpkin to southern
markets on a two day turnaround - all under closed cell refigeration.
Funnily enough much of the same story ran within the banana industry - not including Dad as we went
broke, walked off the farm - and so today there exist massive weigh stations loading hundreds of semitrailers
(now Double Bs) with banana along with thousands of acres turned over to banana farming. At least three
major trucking outfits were born from it all - Nolans/Blenners/Lindsay - that in itself a separate industry
turning over massive amounts of dollars annually.
Yes there is little doubt us beeks here are highly conservative, a good thing in some facets as bees will not
be rushed so the demeanour suits the set culture. However just as that dratted FlowHive jolted us so rudely
into the 21st century so will this whole new face of mass spontaneous pollination.
It is the new players who will grip the rose stem, the ones talking to their own kind at the banks, and so it
will happen, it is just a matter of Time.
For as ol' Joe whispered in broken Orstraylean all those years ago " oi mate she come-a-good the vine you
put the bee, huh, we makeah some goodah money, yeh"... and I did, and we did.
Cheers.
Bill