Queensland strawberry grower recognised for organic practices

Ashbern Farms has seen their hard work and exceptional organic on-farm practices recognised by Australian Organic, with co-owner Brendon Hoyle being named as the 2022 Australian Organic Farmer of the Year.

Their excellent and innovative work, which includes use of biological and mechanical pest control agents, stands alongside their commitment to fair and ethical practices in their workforce, something they discussed when we paid them a visit recently.

Brendon Hoyle, co-owner Ashbern Farms

“Ashbern started back in 2006 when we joined forces with the Carmichael family to tackle the strawberry world together,” said Brendon Hoyle, one of the four pillars that make up Ashbern Farms.

“The name of the farm is made up from the names of my wife Ashleigh and John’s wife Bernie.

“Prior to that, we were running John’s family strawberry farm in Palm View, so we’d had a bit of experience under our belts from there.”

Ashbern Farms grow 30 hectares of strawberries at the Glass House Mountains, while another 20 hectares of summer crop are grown in Stanthorpe – keeping their produce on local market shelves almost 12-months of the year, of which around 10 percent are grown for the organic market.

“This works well for us, we share equipment and ideas between the two families, as well as sharing a workforce, which is really important in this day and age when workers can be hard to get,” Brendon said.

The strawberry varieties grown mostly consist of Red Rhapsody, an easy picking and packing fruit, while they’re beginning to develop their Florida variety, an early-fruiting variety, to help in picking up the start of the season.

“Our organics are fully certified and undergo an audit process every year,” Brendon said.

“Essentially, we have to follow rules and regulations to ensure the crop remains organic, we don’t have access to chemicals and fertilisers that others would, we’ve always got to be thinking outside the box to solve problems that otherwise would be a lot simpler on the conventional side of growing.”

Ashbern Farms, Sunshine Coast

Echoing this is their practice around their on-farm workers.

Ashbern Farms currently makes use of around 40 pickers and packers from the seasonal worker program on farm, alongside a handful of locals and backpackers.

“Workforce is really important to us, we moved to the seasonal worker program because we are building a skilled workforce, we have staff who come and are eager to work, eager to earn and we can transition them between our farms as the season progresses,” he said.

“After nine months they go back home, but our hope is that we can get pickers and packers back from season-to-season, to bring back that familiarity, to help us with the efficiencies in running the farm.”

That is where the application of fair, ethical and sustainable practice for on-farm workers has become so important to Ashbern Farms.

“We’ve been Fair Farms Certified for a few years, we realised that is the way the world is going, and we’re all for it,” Brendon said.

“We like to treat our workforce really well; we couldn’t do it without them, we need them all the same as they need us.

“The Fair Farms system suited us better than SEDEX did, when we saw how much more relevant it was to us, to the farming industry, we could understand the backing and a lot of the reasons the policies are in place.

“We pride ourselves of trying to maintain that, trying to improve ourselves every year, I think all of it is very important these days.

“You do hear stories from workers on places they’ve been working in, or ways they’ve been treated, and there isn’t a need for it anymore.

“If you’re proud of your brand and you want to do the right thing, you need to spend the time and effort on it and get these things right.

“We’re all in it together, it’s about building that trust so people can trust you, to understand what you’re all about and so people can know where their food is coming from.”

An industrialized vacuum machine mounted on a tractor is used to ‘suck up’ Rutherglen bugs. IMAGE: Jane Richter.

Novel approach to pest management recognised

By Jane Richter, Communication Manager, Berries Australia

Brendon Hoyle from Ashbern Farms was recently named as Australian Organic Farmer of the Year, partly for his unusual method of managing the sucking insect Rutherglen bug in the 4.2-hectare organic part of their strawberry business at the Glass House Mountains.

In a radical innovation, Brendon uses an industrialsized vacuum machine mounted on a tractor to literally ‘suck up’ the Rutherglen bug and other pests from the strawberry rows. This innovation allows the farm to continue organic production without the use of pesticides into a time window when traditionally these pest numbers explode due to the warming temperatures of spring.

The bug vacuum is only used for a few weeks at the end of the Sunshine Coast winter strawberry growing season, carefully timed to avoid periods of the day where beneficial insects like honey bees are most active. If the Rutherglen bug is bad, they run over the crop every couple of days. The first pass generally picks up a fair amount of leaf litter, so the screens need to be decluttered a few times.

Each season is different for pest pressure, but in the 2022 season this innovative way of tackling Rutherglen bug enabled the organic production to continue all the way to the effective end of the season in mid-October, giving the farm four additional weeks of viable high-quality production. The bug-sucker will also kill any other insects that are in the crop like Queensland Fruit Fly.

Brendon first saw a similar piece of equipment in use on a strawberry farm in California back in 2015, and with the help of some blueprints sourced from the internet one very handy team member fabricated a single row prototype to do a proof-of-concept, which is always a good idea when you are innovating. It worked and so a larger three-bed machine was made which operates via the Power Take-Off (PTO) at the back of a 50HP tractor.

“The focus in our organic production is to grow the best that we can and not the most that we can; we don’t want to be the biggest, we just want to grow the best,” Brendon said.

“We involve our team to help solve issues, drawing on their farming experiences and giving them a chance to be directly involved with a vested interest in the business.

“The Australian Organic Farmer of the Year award is such a privilege, and an achievement our team is proud to share for all the hard work, not only in growing but picking and packing, and tackling the challenges along the way.”

This article first appeared in the Australian Berry Journal Autumn 2023 edition and has been reproduced with permission.