Toowoomba to Kingaroy

April 29 - Green is the theme for today!

Our first stop today is Withcott Seedlings. Withcott is a major supplier of vegetable seedlings for the East Coast of Australia. They produce more than 420 million seedlings per year and their products include: tomato, broccoli, lettuce, asparagus, rock melon, watermelon, seedless watermelon, cauliflower, pumpkin, chili, parsley, celery and echinacea. Sue Sluther and Charles Wright gave us a tour of the greenhouses, seed storage and planting operation. They told us farmers in Australia have better yields by planting seedlings rather than seeds directly into the ground. Backpackers and immigrants from African countries (especially Nigeria) are commonly hired by producers to sow the seedlings into the ground.


From Withcott, we were on to Emaho Trees, which is a wholesale export nursery joint venture of Birkdale Nursery. Barbara McGeoch, Director of Birkdale Nursery, explained how their operation went international. Their first major international project was Hong Kong Disneyland in 2001 where they helped design the landscaping and supplied the trees, shrubs and grasses. Since then they have established nurseries in China, Hong Kong, Macau and Abu Dhabi, providing landscape architects, developers, contractors and governments with a variety of trees, palms, shrubs and turf. Most trees are in the ground at a nursery for five years. Property Manager Nigel gave us a demonstration on how trees are dug up and replanted using a tree spade.

The rest of the afternoon we took a driving tour of Kingaroy (which means red ant) in the Burnett region. Leoan Woltmann of the Kewpie Group pointed out a pork processing facility, a pig farm and the Kewpie feedmill. The piggery is the only pork processing facility in Queensland. We briefly stopped to get a look at a peanut field, which is a main crop of this area. The soil here is bright red!

Two groups were dropped off at the Kingaroy McDonald's to meet our farm-stay families, while the remaining group stayed on the bus to be dropped off further down the road. My next post will be about my farm stay.