Subscribe
CommunityA visit from Down Under
So. Md. farmers share trade secrets with Australians
Friday, June 27, 2008
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by JESSE YEATMAN
Australian viticulturist Matthew Munzberg, left, and Richard Fuller, a member of the Port of Leonardtown Winery board of directors, check out grapes grown on the Woods’ farm in Mechanicsville last week. Munzberg was among a group of Australians and New Zealanders who visited the region on a scholarship farmer program.
|
E-Mail This Article
The group of farmer scholars was on a trip late last week to Southern Maryland where they visited an oyster ranch, several farms and a produce auction and took a ride on a skipjack.
While some aspects of the small farm communities impressed the group of visitors, others were discouraging.
‘‘I think you’ve got such big issues facing the Chesapeake Bay that Richard can’t do it on his own,” Lester Marshall said.
Marshall, the managing director of Coffin Bay Oyster Farm, felt somewhat at home at the Circle C Oyster Ranch in Ridge, although he was surprised that the oysters were being farmed in such poor water conditions.
Although oysters by nature are environmentally friendly to waters because of their filtering nature, in some ways the bay is so far gone that it may not help, he said.
‘‘We’ve still got visibility, really clear water,” where his oysters are raised in Australia, he said. There is low development — farmland or residential — and thus there is little direct pollutant runoff in Coffin Bay, which is the largest estuary in southern Australia.
‘‘The issue here is bad planning over the last 50 years,” he said.
Rich Pelz, owner of Circle C Oyster Ranch in Ridge, agreed. Along with making a profit from the oysters he raises, Pelz hopes the bivalves will contribute to cleaning the bay’s waters.
‘‘They are very protective about their water quality around their oyster sites. It would be nice if that happened here in Maryland,” Pelz said. ‘‘The reason the water clarity is so bad is we don’t have enough oysters.”
Marshall said he started about 10 years ago with a harvest of six tons of oysters from his southern Australian oyster farm. This year he expects to do about 350 tons, or about 8,750 bushels, which will make up about 5 percent of the oysters sold in his region, he said.
‘‘Your bay is just so full of food, it’s got the potential if it can just be cleaned up,” Marshall said.
Pelz said that there are some 250,000 bushels harvested from the Chesapeake Bay nowadays. There’s a potential for 60 million bushel harvests each year, he said.
‘‘That’s what we could do if we were doing it right,” Pelz said.
That was last Thursday. On Friday the group of visiting farmers started the day at the Loveville auction.
‘‘Our original goal was to sell $1 million a summer and we’ve exceeded that,” said a director of the market who asked that his name not be used in the newspaper. ‘‘This type of auction is very appealing to our culture,” and works well for family farmers, he told the group of visitors.
Somewhere around half of the 90 Amish and Mennonite families in St. Mary’s County probably sell at the auction.
Customers include local grocery chains and as well as farmers from Virginia to Baltimore who have roadside stands. One of the goals of the market, which operates three days a week, was to not take away business from roadside stands, so the quantities auctioned are often big, such as 25 to 50 dozen ears of corn in a batch. There are no reserve prices set for the produce or flowers.
The Australians were interested in the unique culture, especially the idea of not accepting any government subsidies for farming. The Amish do not take such payments nor do they use other government subsidies, except, as one Amish man pointed out, they do ride the public transit system which involves some government money.
Their children attend a local school established by the Amish in the 1960s in the northern end of the county.
‘‘We try to keep it as close as possible as our forefathers had it. Shear survival has forced some technology advances,” he said.
Later, at the Forrest Hall Farm in Mechanicsville the group heard from local governments on land use practices for farmers and got a look at agro-tourism business and a new grape growing operation.
Matthew Munzberg of Mad Dog Wines based in the Australian Barossa Valley said his family grows 120 acres of grapes and has recently taken a foray into making its own wines.
‘‘I think probably we learned from him,” said Richard Fuller, a member of the board of directors for the Port of Leonardtown Winery.
Although Munzberg grows different grape varieties than those on the Woods farm and the climate is drastically different — it is very dry in the Barossa Valley of south Australia — Fuller said it was interesting talking to a fourth-generation grape grower.
‘‘He was very sharp... we had a good conversation,” Fuller said. Munzberg was very willing to share information and Fuller said he would like to follow up with him via e-mail as the Port of Leonardtown Winery develops.
The county and town recently signed a memorandum of agreement to locate the cooperative winery at the old department of transportation building next to McIntosh Run.
‘‘Right now we’re targeting the fall of next to year to start making wine there ... and selling by spring of 2010,” Fuller said.
The Australian and New Zealand farmers visited as part of the Nuffield Farming Scholarship program to pick up on some of the successful strategies started in St. Mary’s agriculture and bring the ideas back to their home country while sharing their techniques with Southern Maryland producers.
