Gold, gold, gold and gold

A walk through the Souks of Dubai is a lot of fun if you are prepared to stop and talk to everyone who asks you to buy what they are selling. As a bald white guy I stand out like the proverbial.....so I have received my fair share of attention. I have learnt that for most of the traders here it's a game of sorts, a true form of negotiation and trade. I'm not good at it and they may have a laugh at my expense after I leave but good humour goes a long way here. A lot of the time they want to know who you are and where you come from as frankly as that, in return I have asked how business has been and how is trade tonight, with all that done you are free to go. I have been told by one local Arab it is tradition in a meeting to ask “how is every one there” meaning your family and homeland. It's a reflection on their culture and attitude in negotiations and the importance of relationships within that.

Another adventure begins, this time the Middle East

I'm always amazed by overseas travel, not that I like to be stuck on a plane in cattle class for more than ten hours mind you. My flight from Brisbane to Dubai via Singapore was well over my ten hour limit but it really is amazing to step off the plane into a new country. The sights, sounds and sometimes smells can be so different you realise all the reading or preconceived ideas you may have had are swept away in no time at all.

It was with some trepidation, I have to admit, that I took this trip to the Middle East. I was unsure of the reception a western man might receive in the Middle East, although it is early days, looking back I'm not sure why I had these fears. The people of Dubai have been very welcoming.

Dubai is a modern city full of beautifully designed buildings. The pace at which Dubai has developed in the last decade is amazing. Up until 2009 25% of the worlds supply of cranes resided in Dubai, although the locals tell me things have slowed down with the down turn in the economy. However, most buildings I have seen still sport a crane or two. Detailed designs both on the building that fill the city and the gold, silver and silk that fill the stores are all over. Narrow streets and ally ways lead to spices and perfumes, jewellery and gems. The home of the Souk - the traditional market place.

Philippines the last stop of our GFP tour

IRRI's rice trials

Our arrival into the Philippines and drive to IRRI, the International Rice Research Institute where we stayed for a few days, occurred only twenty-four hours after a cyclone had passed through the area. I wondered what we were in for as we drove through the middle of the night passing check points with guards armed with machine guns.

The morning revealed a beautiful tropical landscape. There were signs of storm damage as we made our way down to IRRI's main base. Many Nuffield Scholars have visited the institute over the years as part of their global focus tour. With a great set up for researchers and visitors alike, it's no wonder. Hundreds of small trial plots of green crop framed by mountains rising up in the distance greeted us on our first day making a great first impression. IRRI was established in the sixties for the benefit of growers and researchers and remains steadfast in its commitment. Their seed bank of rice from around the world was extensive. Hundreds of varieties existed and we were informed the collection was far from complete.

I noted as we went through the institute there were new varieties being developed to tolerate submergence for several days. This is a major problem in many countries that are hit by flooding due to storm events. It turns out that rice doesn't like swimming, at least not in the deep end. Like many crops they like to keep their head above water. Concurrently, there are varieties also being developed for drought tolerance to lessen the amount of water required to grow a crop. It takes 500 litres to produce a bowl of rice so in a world forecast to be drier the race is on to get more from less.

More from less could be the one thing that all the countries I visited have in common. As farmers we are not dissimilar to each other. It is only the way we deal with the problems of production that set us apart. My Nuffield global focus tour has proven to me the value in seeing how things are done differently to your own business and having access to people that can show you some of the best practise and innovation in their field opens your eyes to greater possibilities for yourself and your industry. I consider myself very fortunate to be given such an opportunity and I thank Nuffield Australia and my sponsors, Horticulture Australia and the Australian Processing Tomato Growers for what is a once in a lifetime experience.

Farmed eels

A visit to a local eel farm prompted some questions from Ben Tyley (our Nuffield craw fisherman) about sustainability after finding out that all of their eel stock are caught as wild young in the local rivers. It is not understood how they breed and little, if any, of their life cycle. The company release some of their mature stock back into the wild to try to avoid depleting their numbers. Over eighty percent of there market goes to Japan.

As our time was drawing to a close, we moved down to Shenzhen. We met with Wallace Chang of CBH who showed us through a malt house where I learnt that a lot of Chinese beer may have up to thirty percent rice added to the malt process to suit their markets. Beer is a popular drink in China (as it is almost anywhere else) and despite my initial apprehension, we all enjoyed the various beers we tried during our time in China.

There was a lot going on in Shenzhen with shipping coming in and out of the harbour with all manner of product. A visit to Shenzhen Southseas Grains Industries Ltd at their port side mill was a case in point, with the capacity to mill 800 tonnes a day and a feed mill capacity of 400 tonnes per day. You can imagine the number of shipping containers with grain coming in from around the world to be processed. ASW type wheat made up the bulk of the mills grain consumption turning this into various forms of flour for breads. We were informed they were looking to expand their mill further which is good news for Aussie wheat as AWB are investors in this mill.

My time in China was very interesting and although my understanding of this culture is very small it's a lot bigger than when I started.

A trip to Taishan

A visit to Sarite Li's family farm was a great day

Driving around in China it was not uncommon to see vegetables being grown on what could best be described as the nature strip. The Chinese love fresh food. With very little to no refrigeration food has to be prepared and eaten relatively quickly. You can order fish or chicken in a market and see the animal killed, prepared and cooked all in a matter of minutes. If you like scorpions you can get them still alive impaled on a skewer ready to cook - you don't get fresher than that! The food we ate in China from north to south was great; all sorts of things prepared in all sorts of ways. Markets proved to be fascinating with some of the most diverse produce observed on the trip. A walk through the Taishan wet markets was an eye opener with everything from pigs to fish and frogs to snakes for sale. There were many types of vegetables, nuts and fruit in any market we went to, some produce familiar, some not. A lot of melons are grown and used in cooking there but one of the most common vegetables used was eggplant. It was in a large proportion of everything we ate, prepared in all manner of ways and was beautiful to eat every time. It was nice to see tomatoes featuring on more than one occasion in some of the dishes as well.

Taishan wet market

Flying south from Hoh Hot to Taishan, we found ourselves in a totally different world of a lush green tropical environment with many rice fields. Taishan claims to be the home of the overseas Chinese. In the late eighties, seventy percent of Chinese Americans claimed ancestry to Taishan.

We were honoured to visit Sarite Li's family farm and village and see what rural life in this area is like. Sarite's father grows vegetables and melons for market. We learnt that most farms are only around one fifteenth of a hectare. No one owns land there and every 5 years farmers have to surrender their plots and are allocated new land through a ballot system. Rice plays a big part in farming there and it is common to see rice drying on the road, sometimes spread over half of it. Rain is common so drying a crop is problematic. The rice is gathered up at the end of every day. Until 2003, all farms paid a rice tax in rice. Now farmers are not forced to grow rice, opening up opportunities for them to grow other things to make an income.

A walk through some rice fields up to a local fish farm and piggery was an eye opening experience. Open effluent running into ponds full of fish had me questioning if I should order fish again for dinner but the fish seemed to be enjoying eating the stuff. I saw a lot of peanuts being stripped and laid out to dry there as well. We noticed a lot of very small rice harvesters (no longer than four metres) being moved around, tiny machines on tracks that most of the grain growers in the group found very interesting. Though I will not be rushing out to buy one, it was a good reflection of the scale of farming in the Taishan area.

Milking China

Angus had us in Hoh Hot to see the centre of milk production in China. It turned out to be the centre geographically so it was where most of the milk processing plants are located. Fresh milk is not common in China with UHT being the mainstay of production.

After the melamine scandal, China's milk industry will take decades to recover, although the current government seems committed to elevating milk consumption. It would be unfair to make too many assumptions with the limited number of dairies I visited in the area, however, I was not struck by the viability of its herds. One company had a bounty, of sorts, on heifers offering to pay high prices over a three year term with interest in order to get their herd numbers up. We were shown before and after photos of these animals with an obvious improvement in their condition once they came under their care. There was no open grazing there. Instead, it is mainly a feedlot set up with a lot of corn grown in and around these dairies. Ed Cox (one of our Nuffield dairy farmers) was excited to see a line up of a dozen Claas silage harvesters owned by one dairy company. They manage the harvest of their silage, contracting out the growing of it to local farmers. One dairy we visited was all but abandoned after a foot and mouth outbreak.

Hoh Hot city

Half of the total production of poultry and pigs on earth are in China, almost all of them coming from small family farms. Conti Asia have found some success in supplying premixed livestock feeds to this giant market. There is very little bulk handling in China so the company move stock by hand in bags everywhere. I witnessed shipping containers of corn meal in Shenzing being shovelled out and bagged by hand. Every truck I saw carrying freight of one type or another in China was loaded to the the point of breaking. If it's a ten ton truck you can bet on it having a twenty ton load; one way to cut down on those food miles I guess.

This will not change for a long time to come. I was surprised to hear a lot of large western businesses come to China and introduce their systems of handling only to fail such as in the feed market where some companies tried to move large volumes of product only to find they are selling to farmers who may have only a half dozen pigs and simply cannot afford to buy a bag of feed let alone bulk. Most feed outlets sell by the cup.

Potatoes on drip in china

After some sightseeing in Beijing (the Great Wall was a stand out), we caught a flight out to Hoh Hot city to see a little of Inner Mongolia. Construction was everywhere we went in China but in Hoh Hot and the drive out to the research site at Si Zi Wang it was off the chart. From road construction to wind turbines it was happening. It was interesting to see honey being sold on the side of the road on more than one occasion and Ben Hooper (our Nuffield apiarist) was busting to get out and sample some of the local product. It was a hot, dry and barren landscape with failing wheat crops the norm. I was stunned to see potatoes being grown with a drip system out there. There was no one to talk to about it. On inspection they had the tape above ground with a clear film of plastic covering the beds holding the tape in place and providing some weed control. The tape was fed by above ground soft sub mains. I can only guess groundwater was the main source of irrigation for the crop as a channel to provide water was nowhere to be seen.

Out at the research station we were shown some trials of dryland pasture. The aim is to extend the grazing there and help farmers with their production.