Lucy Stocker: Celebrating International Women’s Day
Continuously searching for knowledge and an even better cup of coffee, Lucy is at the beginning of a horticulture revolution on the Atherton Tablelands. Surrounded by cattle farms, it’s clear that farmers in the area are looking for other ways to sustain themselves on the land.
With her 30,000 coffee trees she farms with her husband James, Lucy is keen to share insights into coffee growing and processing with other farmers in the region who are looking to diversify.
Lucy chose her property because the topography, soil, and climate replicate conditions that some of the best coffee in the world is grown in.
She recalled visiting Cobán in Guatemala with James, noticing, “the same terrain, same rainforest, same drizzle for most of the year, and amazing coffees come out of there. Basalt soils all exactly the same as here,” she said.
“The only difference is they’ve got monkeys, and we've got cassowaries!”
For Lucy, this reassured her that top quality coffee could be grown in the southern part of the Atherton Tablelands. She views her farm as not only her passion, but also a “proof of concept” for those cattle farmers looking for something different.
“This end of the tablelands was dairies and then it got too expensive and too hard to be dairying up here. So, then it became beef cattle farms, but beef cattle prices are so up and down, and the farms up here are between 40 and 80 hectares. It's pretty hard to make a good living from cattle on 80 ha.”
As her farm is now flourishing Lucy seeks to encourage other farmers in her region to put in small lots of coffee that can be collectively harvested, processed, and roasted.
“I know there are good farmers here,” Lucy stated.
And as she thought about her neighbours who farm, many of them are women.
“One neighbour on this side over here, she butchers her own animals. She runs beef, she drives tractors, she does everything.
“Another woman over here she's got stud cattle,” Lucy told us.
“I'm actually surrounded by women farmers!”
