Baupal Park Farm My Organic Odyssey

07 April 2018

It has been done. We did it.

And I have to thank the casual workers here for their amazing help this week. Friday morning arrived to a frantic electric hive of excitement. It was delivery day - yes my little babies were going to the factory, all 662kg of them. The plan was to get more collected earlier in week, to make up over a tonne, but unfortunately rain has seriously stopped that work. The night before though, with the damp air around, I had to put the silo fan on all night to bring the nuts moisture content down. The optimum level is to be 10% for delivery, otherwise penalties apply to the lot. So the nuts had to be removed from one silo and dumped back into the large receivable bin; then back through sorting machine (damn that thing is noisy) to have a final pick over for insect damage, and then into the second silo, to then be syphoned out into large delivery sacks. Yes its  lot of work, and the planning must be just right. Cant have any nuts escaping! The delivery sacks were already in new trailer waiting for their booty to arrive. Then the moment arrived with hooking up the trailer to the hired ute and off to the factory we went. I cant tell you how exciting it felt, driving down the road towards the factory with all that nut behind me. Very, very satisfying. All in all it was a very successful day for our first delivery.

That's a lot of nuts!

The purchase of that new trailer was first win for week on Easter Monday - a chance find on that glorious Facebook marketplace site, followed by a dash drive out to Nananga, west of here, to view it and pay deposit. Its amazing what that site has to offer - what people want to sell. This purchase secured the logistics run of how we planned to get the nuts to the factory, along with the hiring of a ute from Bunnings. Did you know you can hire a ute for 2 hours at Bunnings? For $35???!!! Anyway that's sorted the issue of not having to buy a new farm truck/ute - at least for this year anyway.

And the other exciting news for week is the workers from Brazil have arrived! Two lovely young workers who have flown in from UK, and are here for, well, two weeks? Lets hope they can stay longer! They are just wonderful and I see long term friendships being forged here too. The purpose of their visit is to learn about the Korean Natural Farming the farm utilises, so later today we are driving to Tin Can Bay to collect the fish frames to make more FAA (Fermented Fish Amino Acid), collect the Bracken Fern to make some more Pteridium pesticide, sea water to ferment for fertilizer and generally enjoy some time out in sunshine...which has finally returned...(oh groan... that means mowing 40 acres of grass again).

Other than this good news, I note the world still turns and Rex is still enjoying his morning cuddles with Black Cockatoos about to have a very rude and loud morning wake up call.