Dear Growers, love from the Ekka
What a wonderful, eye opening, colourful, crazy, and grounding nine days at the Ekka. Touted as the event where city meets country, it was also the event where growers met consumers, politicians met anyone and everyone they could, and we met tens of thousands of advocates of fresh produce.
After a very long hiatus away from this event (no one can tell us how long, but the guess is decades), we decided it was time to go back and ensure horticulture, and even more so our growers, are first and foremost in the minds of consumers. After all, how can Queensland’s biggest agricultural event not include horticulture?
‘Meet a farmer’ at the Ekka was the theme and we took it literally. Every day we celebrated a different commodity and growing region with growers generously giving their time to talk ‘shop’. Citrus, bananas, vegetables, berries, pineapples, apples, macadamias, avocados, and tropical fruits each had a day to engage the public. In person they answered thousands of questions, sharing their knowledge and passion for what they do. Consumers were curious, engaged and overwhelmingly supportive of growers.
As way of example, a very small selection of discussions which took place include: how to peel a mandarin properly, why bananas are harvested green, why certain sizes of produce are only available in retail, how do you pick a ripe pineapple or avocado and how does vanilla grow? Taste testing was extremely popular with 10,000 mandarins, samples of new varieties of citrus, 150kg of apples, 3,000 samples of avocado, countless snacking carrots, hundreds of bananas and thousands of macadamia nuts being given to consumers to try. Ekka goers certainly like a free sample however more importantly, it also gave us a chance to engage the public in some genuine conversations.
Our Dear Grower message board was set up with the intent of gathering consumer insights, good, bad, or indifferent, to share with our members. Our sector is under immense pressure from multiple angles, and we need to understand how that is impacting the people we feed. What eventuated was thousands of messages of overwhelming support, understanding of the challenges, and appreciation of the hard work that goes into every piece of fruit, vegetable or nut grown.
These inspirational messages of support, encouragement and understanding brought an overwhelming awareness that our growers don’t have to do this alone. Growers have an army of supporters; we just need to mobilise them. We can’t wait to share all these messages with members.
