www.nscf.org.au/home/learn/permaculture-education-2/permaculture-design-course-2/

They've a course starting in 8th August.

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Mobydisc said..
Back in May we planted 350 macadamia trees on our little farm. The planting went well with no major mishaps though it was quite relentless and ongoing. We don't have a tractor but do have a 4wd Iseki lawn mower which is kind of like a little tractor that goes in reverse, with the PTO, linkages and big wheels at the front, with the engine & small wheels that steer it at the back. It's a fun vehicle to drive as you sit in the seat with only the mower deck and steering wheel in front of you. We fitted a tow bar on the back and towed a small trailer carrying what was needed to plant the trees. A mini digger with an auger was used to dig the holes for the trees.

After planting I set up a solar powered camera overlooking some of the orchard. I like to look at the video feed when I'm back in the city. Here is a image capture from the camera. We also took pictures and video with better cameras than this one. We will head back in a few months to plant around 70 more trees and will plant 300 more next year.

Drove towards yamba the other day and the sugar cane fields are now replaced with megalopolis macadamia plantings as far as the eye can see .clarencevalleynews.com.au/clarence-to-be-maca-nut-king/ That area was subject to flooding I thought?
Interesting to see/hear your approach/techniques to maca farming Moby , the farmers up Dunoon way use a lot of diesel.

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HotBodMon said..



Drove towards yamba the other day and the sugar cane fields are now replaced with megalopolis macadamia plantings as far as the eye can see .clarencevalleynews.com.au/clarence-to-be-maca-nut-king/ That area was subject to flooding I thought?
Interesting to see/hear your approach/techniques to maca farming Moby , the farmers up Dunoon way use a lot of diesel.

Yes I hear of some big plantings of these trees further north on land that was used to grow sugar cane. I'm not sure how these trees will fare on a flood plain as I've heard they prefer well drained soil. However I've read about established orchards on islands in the Clarence River so it probably works. They plant trees on a big scale there. A big tractor ploughs a furrow in the soil. Behind the plough is a platform the planter sits on with the trees. The tree is dropped into the furrow and another plough folds the soil over the top of the planted tree. So a tree is planted every 15 seconds or so. We take about 3 minutes to dig the hole and another 3 minutes to plant a tree. So its much more slower but its a lot quicker than if we dug the holes with a shovel and crowbar.

Right now growers get around $8 gross for nut in shell. A productive tree can drop around 10kg or more a year. Really productive trees will drop around 30kg a year. So a productive tree could earn $80 to close to $250 or more a year. However when I talk to some growers they say they don't get anywhere near $8 for a kg of nuts. They must pay various levies and fees. So I'm not sure about how much growers actually earn. They all seem to be driving new vehicles though.

I only have land to plant around 850 trees at the most. I've got 400 trees in the ground now. They say 1500 trees is a full time job for one grower. So what we will have will be a bit of a sideline and very small scale compared to the more corporate farms. There is one farm close to where my farm is that has 90,000 trees. Its owned by a big corporation and they employ a lot of people.

In macadamia farming there seems to be three main categories of orchards. Firstly the small ones with less than 1500 trees that are a bit of a sideline for people. Then there are the bigger ones up to about 3000 trees that are a full time job for a couple of people. After this we start getting into the big operations with owner operators hiring people or corporate farms with managers.

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HotBodMon said..

Mobydisc said..
Back in May we planted 350 macadamia trees on our little farm. The planting went well with no major mishaps though it was quite relentless and ongoing. We don't have a tractor but do have a 4wd Iseki lawn mower which is kind of like a little tractor that goes in reverse, with the PTO, linkages and big wheels at the front, with the engine & small wheels that steer it at the back. It's a fun vehicle to drive as you sit in the seat with only the mower deck and steering wheel in front of you. We fitted a tow bar on the back and towed a small trailer carrying what was needed to plant the trees. A mini digger with an auger was used to dig the holes for the trees.

After planting I set up a solar powered camera overlooking some of the orchard. I like to look at the video feed when I'm back in the city. Here is a image capture from the camera. We also took pictures and video with better cameras than this one. We will head back in a few months to plant around 70 more trees and will plant 300 more next year.

Drove towards yamba the other day and the sugar cane fields are now replaced with megalopolis macadamia plantings as far as the eye can see .clarencevalleynews.com.au/clarence-to-be-maca-nut-king/ That area was subject to flooding I thought?
Interesting to see/hear your approach/techniques to maca farming Moby , the farmers up Dunoon way use a lot of diesel.

The sugar cane growing area in the Clarence Valley is very well drained. There is quite a complex grid of drainage canals throughout the whole area. The canals have gates on them where they meet the river so that water can be released at the tides ebb and shut when the tide is rising.

I've just spent two years working in the area. Quite a lot of citrus being planted along with soy beans and tea tree. It is an astonishingly productive valley and has made a lot of folk very wealthy. One of my mates grows sugar cane. When the burn it off prior to harvesting it sends vast amounts of embers into the sky which them fall all over the shop. He refers to them as dollars!

I know that t tree is planted as discribed with a vegetable planter, and is also being planted into ex cane paddocks, but I doubt that more widely spaced and expensive stock such as macadamia and blue berry would be treated so harshly. By the way I sincerely hope that macas work out well on the flat ground as the erosion that occurs from the bare soil under the trees for harvest proposes on the hills is a disgrace

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woko said..
I know that t tree is planted as discribed with a vegetable planter, and is also being planted into ex cane paddocks, but I doubt that more widely spaced and expensive stock such as macadamia and blue berry would be treated so harshly. By the way I sincerely hope that macas work out well on the flat ground as the erosion that occurs from the bare soil under the trees for harvest proposes on the hills is a disgrace

There's good reason why mono culture in nature is rare! Requires constant intervention.

Yeh it's more to do with picking the nut up of the ground, it's most effective to use a type of rolling rake that flips the nut up into a catcher, it doesn't work so well if there's trash on the orchard floor ( grass, stick etc) and if you have contours the fallen nut gets washed into the contour and is buried with the loose top soil and can't be harvested.
So unfortunately erosion is encouraged, and when it rains in the hills around Lismore the Richmond runs red. No wonder it made it into the top rooted rivers list

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woko said..
Yeh it's more to do with picking the nut up of the ground, it's most effective to use a type of rolling rake that flips the nut up into a catcher, it doesn't work so well if there's trash on the orchard floor ( grass, stick etc) and if you have contours the fallen nut gets washed into the contour and is buried with the loose top soil and can't be harvested.
So unfortunately erosion is encouraged, and when it rains in the hills around Lismore the Richmond runs red. No wonder it made it into the top rooted rivers list

This is the old way to manage a maca orchard. Grass between the trees was killed off by both shade from the trees and herbicide. This made it easier to collect nuts from the ground.

For at least ten years macadamia growers have been encouraged to grow the soil through applying organic matter, pruning trees and planting shade tolerant grass. Many growers are doing this and they have found trees are healthier and more productive when the soil is alive and healthy.

My land is on a slope so it could potentially suffer from erosion. I'll do my best to minimise erosion.

I don't have a harvester or tractor yet. I'll look at getting one with the bristles that pick the nuts off the ground. I'll see if I can get away without a sweeper on it by having the harvester set to the side so it go under the trees.

There will be a lot of problems I look forward to trying to work out.

There's been many attempts at an efficient harvest system - collars around tree into a collection conduit, outrageously expensive and prone to clutter with trash - tree shakers so the crop can be gathered at a specified time, both methods failed as the root system of the tree is a tad week. You would think that since the nut is spherical it would be as simple as playing marbles ! The prize will go to the grower whom develops a shade tolerant lawn bowls type ground cover or a robotic hands and knees type picker upper good luck with you endeavour

Cheers Woko.

We really enjoyed the process of planting the trees. It's great to know these trees, if all goes well, will outlast us. Also I'm fulfilling a dream of my dad as he wanted a macadamia orchard on the farm. Unfortunately I was not interested in planting trees till after he died. I now often think my life would have been a lot different if I'd gotten into this 20 years ago.

There is a fellow up in Queensland who is working on a small scale drone type nut harvester. If it comes about I'd be keen to buy two or four little autonomous battery powered drone harvesters than a big tractor & harvester attached.

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Mobydisc said..
Cheers Woko.

We really enjoyed the process of planting the trees. It's great to know these trees, if all goes well, will outlast us. Also I'm fulfilling a dream of my dad as he wanted a macadamia orchard on the farm. Unfortunately I was not interested in planting trees till after he died. I now often think my life would have been a lot different if I'd gotten into this 20 years ago.

There is a fellow up in Queensland who is working on a small scale drone type nut harvester. If it comes about I'd be keen to buy two or four little autonomous battery powered drone harvesters than a big tractor & harvester attached.

Lovely.
I just fenced off 2 or 3 acres of nice dirt on my farm to create exclusively fruit trees small orchard and vege patch .
Started with variety of 20 fruit trees.
Each one with individual irrigation.
Timer setup to water for 30 min at 11 am .
So far it is a race.
Me against kangguru and possums.
Some trees have already all leaves missing,
Fig tree looks like first delicacy for small furry friends.

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Macroscien said..

Mobydisc said..
Cheers Woko.

We really enjoyed the process of planting the trees. It's great to know these trees, if all goes well, will outlast us. Also I'm fulfilling a dream of my dad as he wanted a macadamia orchard on the farm. Unfortunately I was not interested in planting trees till after he died. I now often think my life would have been a lot different if I'd gotten into this 20 years ago.

There is a fellow up in Queensland who is working on a small scale drone type nut harvester. If it comes about I'd be keen to buy two or four little autonomous battery powered drone harvesters than a big tractor & harvester attached.

Lovely.
I just fenced off 2 or 3 acres of nice dirt on my farm to create exclusively fruit trees small orchard and vege patch .
Started with variety of 20 fruit trees.
Each one with individual irrigation.
Timer setup to water for 30 min at 11 am .
So far it is a race.
Me against kangguru and possums.
Some trees have already all leaves missing,
Fig tree looks like first delicacy for small furry friends.

What sort of fencing have you used? I'm a big proponent for solar powered electric fencing. It's fairly cheap & easy to set up & I've seen a wallaby whacked by 5.6 KV. It was not fun for it. I've been whacked by it myself and every joint in me down to my ankles felt it.

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Mobydisc said..

Macroscien said..

Mobydisc said..
Cheers Woko.

We really enjoyed the process of planting the trees. It's great to know these trees, if all goes well, will outlast us. Also I'm fulfilling a dream of my dad as he wanted a macadamia orchard on the farm. Unfortunately I was not interested in planting trees till after he died. I now often think my life would have been a lot different if I'd gotten into this 20 years ago.

There is a fellow up in Queensland who is working on a small scale drone type nut harvester. If it comes about I'd be keen to buy two or four little autonomous battery powered drone harvesters than a big tractor & harvester attached.

Lovely.
I just fenced off 2 or 3 acres of nice dirt on my farm to create exclusively fruit trees small orchard and vege patch .
Started with variety of 20 fruit trees.
Each one with individual irrigation.
Timer setup to water for 30 min at 11 am .
So far it is a race.
Me against kangguru and possums.
Some trees have already all leaves missing,
Fig tree looks like first delicacy for small furry friends.

What sort of fencing have you used? I'm a big proponent for solar powered electric fencing. It's fairly cheap & easy to set up & I've seen a wallaby whacked by 5.6 KV. It was not fun for it. I've been whacked by it myself and every joint in me down to my ankles felt it.

So far I have ordinary 5 lines of spiky barbed wire ( cattle style) .Indeed, I have been thinking about electric fence, that i use a lot for my cattle.Does it works for possums too? It seem that they do climb over relatively dense steel net. I did try to surround trees , with this steel net and found damage anyway .Does any over creatures also after our fruit trees ? Ants? Beetles ? or something else could eat leaves on young trees?

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Mobydisc said..
Cheers Woko.

We really enjoyed the process of planting the trees. It's great to know these trees, if all goes well, will outlast us. Also I'm fulfilling a dream of my dad as he wanted a macadamia orchard on the farm. Unfortunately I was not interested in planting trees till after he died. I now often think my life would have been a lot different if I'd gotten into this 20 years ago.

There is a fellow up in Queensland who is working on a small scale drone type nut harvester. If it comes about I'd be keen to buy two or four little autonomous battery powered drone harvesters than a big tractor & harvester attached.

They have robotic track machines that can tram up and down large scale cotton/ canola etc crops, detect weeds and burn em, so a similar bot could see a nut in the ground cover and suck it up ?

We are heading back to the farm/orchard in a month. The main task is to plant 70 more Macadamia trees. We should get them in the ground in two days. This planting will be aided by a little vehicle we bought for the farm. It's a Club Car Carryall. With its tray and a trailer it should make it a lot easier to move material around to plant & mulch the trees. Next year we will plant around 320 more, a different variety that prodigious and doesn't grow into huge monster trees. This may do us but we might plant a couple of hundred more.

Ive been reading on how to prune new macadamia trees too. If they are correctly pruned I hope they will start fruiting in a few years so I can blow the big smoke away. It sucks living here now with everyone sh!Tscared.

I'll probably buy a windsurfer LT & go sailing in the river over summer if we move back there. It will be a flashback to 35 years ago. There are probably more sharks around now than back then.

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Mobydisc said..
Back in May we planted 350 macadamia trees on our little farm. The planting went well with no major mishaps though it was quite relentless and ongoing. We don't have a tractor but do have a 4wd Iseki lawn mower which is kind of like a little tractor that goes in reverse, with the PTO, linkages and big wheels at the front, with the engine & small wheels that steer it at the back. It's a fun vehicle to drive as you sit in the seat with only the mower deck and steering wheel in front of you. We fitted a tow bar on the back and towed a small trailer carrying what was needed to plant the trees. A mini digger with an auger was used to dig the holes for the trees.

After planting I set up a solar powered camera overlooking some of the orchard. I like to look at the video feed when I'm back in the city. Here is a image capture from the camera. We also took pictures and video with better cameras than this one. We will head back in a few months to plant around 70 more trees and will plant 300 more next year.

Awesome Job moby Looking good. Have to post updates on how its all going In 15 years your going to pulling some tonnage of nut of them !

I wasnt expecting produce of mine for a couple of years but Its all seemed to of fallen in place

Living in Sydney suburbs I have a couple of citrus trees, they fruit quite prolificly BUT we have possums that feel the need to take a bite out of every piece of fruit and sometimes devour the entire skin, leaving the skinless fruit hanging on the tree.

get a good dental/dental plan for your pesky possums and grow some chestnut or macadamia. whats the go with water supply moby ? im only small scale like 50 trees citrus stone fruit etc.

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busterwa said..
get a good dental/dental plan for your pesky possums and grow some chestnut or macadamia. whats the go with water supply moby ? im only small scale like 50 trees citrus stone fruit etc.

Possums are marsupials so I guess they get a set of adult teeth and that is it, unlike rodents who are fortunate enough to have their teeth continually growing.

Basically my farm's water system is a twenty thousand liter water tank, a six hundred liter water trailer, a vehicle to tow it and hoses to water the trees. Heavily watering the tree when planting gives it a better chance of surviving. What it comes down to is where my farm is the amount of water evaporating from the soil is less than the amount of rain falling on the soil. So once the trees are planted they should not need watering. Up north in Queensland the opposite is the case where evaporation is greater than precipitation. So macadamia growers up there must irrigate their trees. Its a completely different industry up there. They have huge farms on flat land and are big enterprises. Many of them used to grow sugar. They are flipping over to macadamia farming as its more profitable than growing cane.

I'm thinking of building a dam down the bottom but there are a lot of rules on dam building now days so I probably won't worry about it. I investigated having a bore dug. However I think it would cost all up around $20K for a bore hole and pump set up and there is no guarantee there will be water or the quality of it. I'd rather spend the $20K on five or six twenty thousand liter water tanks set up in series. Last year we thought it would never rain again but it did. It does rain and the more water storage you have, the better you can cope with irregular rainfall.

The soil around your trees looks pretty sandy busterwa. Have you considered mulching the trees with organic material like wood chip or straw to build up and enrich the soil around the trees?

Sweet moby planted them in 2- 1.5 1.5 deep top soil (just like planting them in a pot but in the ground)top soil was pushed up buy a loader when they cleared the house pad. The top soil has broken down nicely with widgety grubs and worms present have added key elements like lime to raise offset the soil ph .. it If the become deficiency will throw out lupins ..
Im only doing it as a hobby But the extent your doing it is very calculated like commercial.I make my money in heavy industry
Anyhow You know what your doing Ill put some heavy mulch across the ones that with get baked in the summer ;-) .
There is some variety's that wont grow in my area So situation awareness is the key to success.
We leave it at that and not give to many secrets away leave the industry specialised ;-)

Keeps the price of your produce up ;-)
Im gona chuck in a few macadamia have a line of 6 But its a gamble with the frost in the early years If it fail will dump pecan trees in there.
Good thing about nuts Its not like stone fruit where they harvest and go off Nuts can be dried and stored.
Just growing cause kids will eat me out of house and home and rather than pay 10 for a smoko truck lunch can take a bag on nuts to work
Legend Moby

Since dipping my little toe into the macadamia industry I've found growers and processors are very happy to share information with each other. The nut industry is massive and macadamia nuts take up a very small percentage of it, less than three percent. One of the industry's main issues has been lack of supply. A local grower gave me a stack of association magazines going back to 2006. The common theme going through 14 years was increasing the supply of macadamia nuts. I did not really understand why increasing supply was needed to make the industry more profitable till it dawned on me that if buyers have a good supply then they will invest into products containing macadamia nuts, like confectionary and other foods. If a food manufacturer sunk just say a million bucks into a product containing macadamia nuts and then next year they could not get the nuts to continue making the food, they would never ever want to use the nuts in the future.

Frost is an issue early on, till the trees are three or four years old. Its an issue where my trees are as it can get frosty. I think the trees recover from mild frost damage.

Job done moby mulched out turned over sand with organics and left a 200mm radius around the roots as says almond like the drainage. So for anyone growing them in metro west aus . The Johnson prolific and alland brands are perfect. The fritz and mission are a little staggered with the dormancy but i guess as they get bigger the flowering will over lap. All other Nectarines and plumbs have really kicked off flowering off Grapes are shooting Apricots still dormant Should see some action and some growth going into spring.

Hey moby im got a row of 8 thats been reticulated but left open Im looking to put in row Macadamia as there is people growing them in my area. (not on your scale)

Theres not alot of information on them Macadamia seedling in Western aus are pretty much rare as rocking horse **** so im at the stage where to buy off gumtree im checking the variety most plants are ungrafted but im not looking for hudge produce early ref era.daf.qld.gov.au/id/eprint/1964/14/mac-varieties.pdf


Anyways Moby Just wondering (pic off local of gumtree add ) do they need cross pollination i can place them in a ssw fashion for wind pollination Is there a strategy for producing nuts I know they grow here but theres not alot of information on the species variety's etc. Im not a commercial grower but just want to grow a couple Will they self pollinate? they say if you want to plant a tree you should of done it 10 years ago! (are these seedling ng9?)

I grabbed them Moby seller identified them as a A268 or NG8 but unable to confirm until it nuts if not as they get older run another line of cross pollinators behind them , Very surprising as guy was a young bloke Felt sorry as he lived in suburbia and had a row of like 5 planted out about 9 foot high in the middle of suburbia the spacing was like about 1.5 metres Dude was a legend He said that these trees are native and more people should plant them out.
Anyways Moby good luck to you mate organically grown macadamia are at 52$ a kilo shelled at my local wooliez Your a smart fella done the maths!
A wise man always said Have one hand in industry and one hand on the land!

Hi Buster.

What you are doing sounds good. I'm still learning about these trees. A mistake was made with my tree planting. You identified the issue but I ignored it. I planted too many trees of the same variety in one plot. Its hopefully not a fatal mistake for a few reasons. The variety I planted, the 849 can fertilize itself. Secondly I do have some trees of the 246 variety close by. Finally we missed a few spots and still have more to plant. So in two weeks 70 more 849 trees are going to be planted along with 5 more 246 varieties.

However if I made the same mistake with my next planting it would be a disaster. The variety I plan to plant next will not fertilize flowers by trees of the same variety. So I'm going to plant a square ring of different variety trees in side the plot of these trees.

If you want to learn more about macadamia trees a fellow I know has a lot of videos on them. His channel is called Australia Macadamias. He is based up near Lismore which is one of the big areas to grow these trees. The PDF manual you have is good. I downloaded it too.

I don't think its possible to go completely organic with these nuts. There are a lot of insects that will attack the flowers and the nuts. However once the trees get going I'll see what can be done. With the prices growers are getting around $8 a kg for nut in shell. A decent tree will drop 10 kg of nut. These prices are great for the growers.

Good luck with your planting. I think these trees will grow fine around the Perth area as the weather there is similar to the weather these trees grow well on the east coast.

yes moby very specalized the overall yeild would be upto 50+ kilo a tree. i learning aswell even with other trees, had to run nitrogen to upgrade soil. moved alot of sheet metal and old metal scraps today down the back of property ,uncovered 3 dugites of substantial size . put them to sleep very quickly with a sharpened showel they moved very slow. they like even still going down the firebreak without out a head. blue tounges are out now here in wa aswell . gota wear some decent boots gloves and long sleave pants when moving thu the trees and grass mate situational awareness! NO_CONVERSATION_EXISTS