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Coffee that grows in Australia
You'd normally associate the Whitsundays with long lazy days on palm-fronded tropical islands, cocktail in hand. But it's a little-known fact that it's also home to Australia's third largest coffee farm.
In an area that's traditionally been sugar cane territory, it's hard to miss the quarter of a million trees that stand out against the backdrop of sugar, just outside of Proserpine, about 100km north of Mackay.
Peter Phillips is one man who likes his coffee and expects to harvest 60 tonnes of the crop this year. Even though he may like to consider himself a bit of a pioneer, coffee's actually been grown in the Whitsundays, according to Peter, since the late 1800s. With the advent of the prosperous sugar cane industry, Peter says coffee went by the wayside. Coffee first came to the district with the original settlers who brought a few plants with them to ensure they wouldn't have to break their coffee habit.
So how did Peter Phillips and his family, previously cane farmers, get started? "When we decided to get into coffee production we went looking for some of these old nurseries and old plantations and we were lucky enough to find one down at Wilsons beach which had some of the original plants growing wild," explains Peter. "We took some of the seeds off those trees and the 120,000 trees growing in this plantation are actually descendents from those original trees planted in the late 1800s down at Conway."
While many wouldn't consider Australia to be the ideal coffee-growing environment, according to Peter, the plant adapts to the climate perfectly. "This is the most important feature of the coffee we're growing here, it's Arabica beans, which are the very best quality beans but because they've been growing in the Whitsunday district for that long period of time, they've adapted to the particular climate we've got here and that's why we've had so much success," he says.
Peter explains the process. "We've got our own nursery here and we start with the little coffee beans themselves. We're using technology that we've adopted from the tomato farmers up in Bowen to propagate the coffee seeds. We have a nursery where we can grow 20,000 coffee plants at any given time, then we plant those out and from planting them out to when we get our first harvest is normally about three years. But the coffee tree will continue to grow until it's about 12 foot high and it more or less maintains its shape to around about that size and at the end of about 50 years, you go through and stump them and they start growing again. It's a great crop to be growing in the Whitsundays," he says enthusiastically.
But how does Australia compare to other coffee-growing locations world-wide? "We believe the climate in the Whitsundays is one of the best in the world to grow coffee," says Peter. His logic goes something like this. "In Hawaii they grow Konah coffee at a latitude of about 20 degrees north of the equator and here in Proserpine we're about 20 degrees south of the equator," Peter says. And as well as that, one of the biggest coffee growing regions in the world which is in San Paulo in Brazil is also at the same latitude as the Whitsundays. So the climate here is absolutely suited to the growing of coffee and quality coffees."
Peter's very excited about this year's harvest, about 60 tonnes he estimates compared to 18 tonnes in their first year of harvest, last year. The reason for the higher tonnage, "it's because we've now learnt how to properly irrigate and fumigate the plants we're seeing a massive increase in our crop this year."
Peter Phillips is only selling his Whitsunday coffee locally and online at the moment because they're only making enough to satisfy local demand. He says they've had great success with world-wide online sales and it's been given the thumbs up by his Hawaiin coffee-growing counterparts. "We went to a Hawaiin coffee growers convention to learn more and took some of our beans with us," explains Peter. "We did a blind tasting and with eight occasions in a blind tasting, they picked our coffee as being better than their own coffee which was quite exciting to us."
In deference to his Hawaiin counterparts, Peter explains the advantage of growing coffee Hawaii compared to Australia. "In Hawaii you get rain every day which makes it very hard for them to co-ordinate the flowering of the coffee trees," explains Peter. "Whereas here we have a very distinct wet season, we're able to stress the coffee plant so that it comes on to flower all at once. As soon as we start watering then all of a sudden it will burst out into flower and set the fruit so the importance difference is that here we're able to harvest right through very easily."
So would Peter recommend coffee growing to fellow sugar cane farmers as a method of diversification? "Others growers have looked at it but of course they're all waiting for us to get the process right," says Peter. "We don't say it's the answer but we say it's part of the answer to diversifying." As sugar cane farmers we were price takers but as coffee growers we are price givers because we process the coffee ourselves, we package it ourselves and it's a unique coffee because it's a single estate coffee and that's where coffees are going today. People want single estate coffees because they've got a particular flavour rather than all the blended coffees that we drink."
Part of the venture's success, Peter attributes to the speed of the process, simply by virtue of being locally grown. "Most of the coffee we get here in Australia is at least two years old by the time we drink it, by the time it's picked overseas, shipped somewhere, then it's blended and then shipped to Australia. We're selling coffee straight off the farm, it's picked, roasted and in the hands of the consumers in the space of a matter of months."
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