In an example of how the abstract world of finances can impact on the real supply of food, olive producer Boundary Bend stopped picking $26million worth of olives last week because of fears it would not be paid because the company that owned 20% of the crop, Timbercorp, is under administration. Timbercorp’s administrator successfully applied to the Federal Court for permission to sell the crop to Boundary Bend so that the picking and processing can continue.

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From The Land

IDEAL growing conditions during two wet summers have kicked along stands of native Mitchell grass re-established by landholders on the north-west plains.

A number of farmers in the Walgett and Coonamble areas have restored Mitchell grass pastures to their properties, reclaiming in particular old farming country and weed infested areas.

The once-vast plains of Mitchell grass quoted in the diaries of explorers and settlers have diminished over the decades, thinned by heavy grazing, cropping, weed competition, drought and flood inundation.

The grass is well adapted to the 200- to 250-millimetre rainfall zones and heavy cracking clay soils.

The north-west plains lie at the southern extremity of its habitat, which stretches in a discontinuous band through western Queensland and the Northern Territory to the Kimberley in Western Australia.

Coonamble farmer and general manager of Castlereagh Macquarie Weeds County Council, Ian Kelly, said several thousand hectares of Mitchell grass had been resown in the area by landowners in recent years.

From The Land

WITH global raw sugar prices forecast to continue an upward trend on the back of what’s shaping up to be an international crop deficit of six million tonnes this financial year, interest in putting additional NSW northern coastal land under cane is growing.

World market raw sugar prices have traded between US12.5 and US14 cents a pound during the past four weeks, and analysts say ongoing reductions in crop predictions from key production countries, India and Brazil, is setting the scene for solid returns for Australian cane growers for the next two to three years.

While prices have not yet hit the dizzying US17.5c/lb heights of a short period less than three years ago, they are a long way from the bottoms of US4c/lb to US6c/lb cane growers suffered for the first half of this decade.

India has revised its 2008-09 production to 16 to 16.5 million tonnes, compared to the 26.5m produced last financial year, on the back of favourable soybean, rice and wheat prices and monsoonal conditions, Rabobank commodities analyst, Adam Tomlinson, Sydney, said.

And while sugar is offering better returns than ethanol in Brazil, there is a limit to how much of the South American country’s cane crop can be used to make sugar, Mr Tomlinson said.

Brazil has also been hard hit by the economic downturn, with expansion dampened by a lack of available credit and reports existing mills are even struggling to open for this season’s crush.

From the Australian Financial Review

Up to 19 giant olive harvesting machines, each referred to as “The Colossus”, were switched off at 7pm on Monday on two Victorian olive plantations by an entity that is 19.4 per cent owned by the failed Timbercorp Securities.

According to The Australian Financial Review, Boundary Bend, an entity that harvests and processes olives on behalf of Timbercorp, stopped the harvest on Monday night because of fears that it wouldn’t be paid.

Boundary Bend is 19.4 per cent owned by Timbercorp but the Timbercorp administrators don’t have control of it because it is majority owned by businessmen Rob McGavin and Paul Riordan.

Timbercorp administrator KordaMentha yesterday made an application in the Federal Court seeking a legal opinion on whether it had the right to use some of the proceeds of the sale of olive oil from the 2008 Timbercorp crop to help fund the harvesting and processing of the 2009 crop.

The court was told that if the 2009 crop at two plantations at Boort in north central Victoria and Boundary Bend near Swan Hill was not harvested, the $26 million from future olive oil sales would be lost.

The scientists found that the chlorophylls are highly efficient at harvesting light energy. “We found that the orientation of the chlorophyll molecules make green bacteria extremely efficient at harvesting light,” said Donald Bryant, Ernest C. Pollard Professor of Biotechnology at Penn State and one of the team’s leaders. According to Bryant, green bacteria are a group of organisms that generally live in extremely low-light environments, such as in light-deprived regions of hot springs and at depths of 100 meters in the Black Sea. The bacteria contain structures called chlorosomes, which contain up to 250,000 chlorophylls. “The ability to capture light energy and rapidly deliver it to where it needs to go is essential to these bacteria, some of which see only a few photons of light per chlorophyll per day.”

Because they have been so difficult to study, the chlorosomes in green bacteria are the last class of light-harvesting complexes to be characterized structurally by scientists. Scientists typically characterize molecular structures using X-ray crystallography, a technique that determines the arrangement of atoms in a molecule and ultimately gives information that can be used to create a picture of the molecule; however, X-ray crystallography could not be used to characterize the chlorosomes in green bacteria because the technique only works for molecules that are uniform in size, shape, and structure. “Each chlorosome in a green bacterium has a unique organization,” said Bryant. “They are like little andouille sausages. When you take cross-sections of andouille sausages, you see different patterns of meat and fat; no two sausages are alike in size or content, although there is some structure inside, nevertheless. Chlorosomes in green bacteria are like andouille sausages, and the variability in their compositions had prevented scientists from using X-ray crystallography to characterize the internal structure.”

To get around this problem, the team used a combination of techniques to study the chlorosome. They used genetic techniques to create a mutant bacterium with a more regular internal structure, cryo-electron microscopy to identify the larger distance constraints for the chlorosome, solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to determine the structure of the chlorosome’s component chlorophyll molecules, and modeling to bring together all of the pieces and create a final picture of the chlorosome.