Stewart Ross is going broke. He grows vegetables in the black-soil flats at Pialligo, near the Molonglo River.
It’s not that he’s a bad farmer, or that his vegetables are not fresh. it’s just that he has nowhere to sell them. He, a dozen other ACT fruit and vegetable growers and dozens more from as far away as Orbost want to market directly their produce in Canberra. But the present marketing system won’t let them. They can only send their produce to Sydney.
On some occasions, Mr Ross has sent produce from his 20-hectare farm to Sydney only to find transport and agents’ fees are not covered by the price he has got. The result has been a bill, not a profit.
On many occasions he has had to plough his crop in for want of a place to sell.
He wants a producers’ market for the fruit and vegetable farmers in the district. This is not to be confused with the sort of retail market in Fyshwick and Belconnen. Mr Ross describes these as monopoly supermarkets in a carpark.
A producers’ market would sell in large lots mainly to retailers, restaurants, institutions and some ordinary consumers with special large orders.
He envisaged a very-early-morning market in the old Went worth Avenue bus depot at Kingston. Images of the Covent Garden market in My Fair Lady come to mind. “”Every other major city in Australia has a direct producers’ market,” he said this week.
Pialligo was set up to supply Canberra, but it was unable to because of restrictive marketing. Mr Ross said if there were an unrestricted market producers would be able to sell their produce directly.
There were many advantages. At producers’ markets elsewhere they had random health checks for fungicides and insecticides. He thought that without these in the ACT, there was a risk the ACT could be a dumping ground for below-standard fruit and vegetables from elsewhere.
There would be a genuine supply-and-demand market in Canberra so consumers would know what the price should be. At present supplies into Canberra could be limited to keep prices up.
Further local produce would be fresher and local growers could respond quickly to demands for exotic fruit and vegetables from ethnic communities which are too risky to import from outside the ACT or not otherwise supplied.
A producers’ market would create jobs in the region.
Mr Ross said, “”Under the present system the difference between the producers’ price and the retail price was too large, with both the producer and consumer losing.”
At present the old bus depot was partly being used by the LEDI scheme (Local Employment Development Incorporated), but Mr Ross thought a market could still be accommodated.