News

Part of the CERES Fair Food newlsetter series, words by Chris Ennis. On Friday, sustainable architect and CERES Fair Wood patron, Paul Haar, was profiled in a wonderful piece on Gardening Australia. A theme throughout Paul’s career has been the creative and thoughtful use of timber in his buildings coupled with an equally creative and thoughtful approach to sourcing wood. One of the creative and thoughtful timber sources Paul’s introduced to Fair Wood has been milling trees that have fallen across roads or are endangering houses. The storm that tore through Victoria a week and a half ago brought down so many mature trees that Hayden Cronin, Fair Wood’s manager, has been inundated by emails asking for help – including one from a landholder in Newbury who had lost more than 100 trees. Offers of fallen trees to mill were already coming in after the story we did on urban sawmiller Paul McKay but since last week’s storm we are now thinking about how we can do more to save these trees from becoming firewood and mulch. With so many trees on the ground and time against him, Hayden mused this week that if Fair Wood had a space to keep the logs he could progressively mill them through the year.

Part of the CERES Fair Food newlsetter series, words by Chris Ennis.   This summer over 40% of forests set aside for native logging operations have burned. With the end of native logging in Victoria recently announced, the bushfires have just ramped up the fight for what’s left in our forests a whole lot of notches. Up in the Victorian central highlands VicForests’ logging contractors, who were already struggling to fill woodchip and timber quotas before the bushfires, have continued clear-felling forests. Desperate to protect the now much-reduced greater glider, smoky mouse, sooty and powerful owl habit, citizen science group WOTCH successfully sought a supreme court injunction to stop the logging. Meanwhile, The Australian Forest Products Association (AFPA) are lobbying politicians to keep woodchippers and timber mills going by giving them the go ahead to begin salvage logging in State Forests and National Parks. Countering the call Professor David Lindermeyer, a prominent landscape ecologist and conservation biologist, says studies show salvage logging pollutes waterways, kills surviving wildlife and potentially delays forest recovery by more than a hundred years. The AFPA are also talking up “mechanical thinning” as a means of hazard reduction and as a source of woodchips and timber into the future.  Pushing back, conservationists view thinning as a cover to continue and expand native logging. Before Christmas we didn’t have enough forest. Now we have even less. The scale of the fires boggles my mind; 10 million hectares of forest burned so far, one billion animals killed. Sometimes I’m tempted to think that we’ve actually lost this and my thoughts turn to stockpiling lentils and enrolling our kids into crossbow classes. But the other day I saw this email from Philippa Noble, a tree farmer among other things at Brimin Lodge Farm near Yarrawonga. It was written to the President of the Institute of Foresters of Australia, it read… …..In a drier climate with more dry lightning strikes igniting fires, timber plantations near mountainous native forest areas will become more and more risky.  If all farmers were encouraged to plant 10% of their farms to managed plantations of fire tolerant species, not only would it spread the resource, benefit farmers and make the industry more resilient, it would also assist with habitat creation and carbon mitigation. We are being told that we need transformational change to deal with the changing climate – this is an opportunity for transformational change….. It was so sensible, so practical and so doable; a shared, low-tech solution requiring a small but powerful change in the way we grow our food and fibre. It was LandCare for our timber. And who couldn’t get behind that?

Part of the CERES Fair Food newlsetter series, words by Chris Ennis.   You may remember last year Goldfields agroforesters, Mal Brown and Ben Boxshall, came down to the Fair Wood warehouse in Preston to talk sustainable firewood. Each year in Australia we collectively burn around seven million tonnes of firewood, much of it sourced in a not-so-transparent way from native forests as “fallen or dead wood”. There’s nothing as lovely as a wood fire, but there’s also nothing as lovely as a native forest. There’s an emerging movement of foresters who are thinking very differently about the timber plantations they manage. Mal and Ben from wood4good are such foresters. When I think of timber plantations I see acres of pine trees or blue gums clear-felled on maturity, debris burned and replanted again. When Mal and Ben think of timber plantations they see perennial forestsregulating and protecting land, water, biodiversity and climate. To Mal and Ben timber is just one of the by-products of a sensitively managed tree plantation.  Their goal for a tree plantation is to become a perpetual source of renewable materials, bio-energy and income.  wood4good are currently working in a 300 hectare red ironbark and sugar gum plantation owned by Greater Bendigo City Council.  Planted on degraded grazing land, the plantation is now twenty years old – the time for smaller trees to be selectively thinned giving larger trees room to mature into saw logs. The thinned trees, thick as fence posts, are traditionally seen as waste and pushed into piles and burned. Instead, wood4good sees this “waste product” as an opportunity to help pay for forest management as well as reducing pressure on native forests to supply firewood. Last year while Fair Wood was trialling sales of bagged firewood we had lots of requests and emails about supplying bulk firewood. Last week Fair Wood took delivery of a flat-bed truck and began dropping pallet cages full of Mal and Ben’s sugar gum firewood around Melbourne (that’s them in the pic below). Sugar gum, like red gum, is incredibly dense and slow burning – the two qualities of a good firewood. Read more about our Sustainable firewood here. You can also find 15kg bags of sugar gum here on the Fair Food website – we deliver them with grocery orders. 

Part of the CERES Fair Food newlsetter series, words by Chris Ennis.   Lately CERES has felt a bit like a ghost town.  But today people are emerging and are enjoying the autumn sunshine along with the chickens scratching for bugs. In Honey Lane passing walkers stare up at the new tram-sized mechanical millipede that now dominates the hill. Rearing up with steam punk robotic arms it feels like it could crash through the casuarinas and devour the old train carriage below. I’ve come down with my eldest son to see how the new Terra Wonder playspace is going and also to have a sneaky play.  Spinning an auger attached to the millipede’s antenna my boy disappears up through yawning jaws, runs the length of the body and slides out the mighty beast’s recycled tyre anus with an, “Oooooooh, that feels disgusting!” This awesome insect vision has been conjured into life by artist, Steve Mushin, creative director, Nick Curmi, and a team of CERES builders and welders. Work-shopped with a group of local kids the space is a learning in itself. Set amongst a 500x magnified soil-food-web, Terra Wonder is a world where almost everything has been salvaged or recycled. Resident industrial sculptor, Nick Curmi loves scrounging.  For months he’s been trawling scrap-yards around the state for old machinery to manifest Steve Mushin’s drawings. The solid steel millipede head weighing a couple of tons was once a 150 year old steam-jacketed chocolate tempering pan from a Cadburys’ factory. Its mechanical antennae are retired robot arms that built cars on an automotive production line. The legs are made from massive ropes that were used to moor the Spirit of Tasmania. Even the new macrocarpa body slats, sourced by CERES Fair Wood, are salvaged from old farm windbreaks destined for a bonfire. During the week I get an email from Nick Curmi looking for a truck to pick up a huge excavator arm that will be used to create an arched entrance-way. The arm is sitting in a scrap yard in Warrnambool that’s rumoured to be full of retired industrial machinery – a veritable scavenger’s El Dorado. I imagine Curmi at his desk trembling like a prospector ridden with gold fever.  The mechanical millipede will be the first of Terra Wonder’s elements to be completed.   Still to come are giant fungal walkways, cocoon tree-houses, worm tunnels (made from enormous recycled steel pipes) and a rescued crane that nods to CERES’ quarry past. Like so many of CERES’ projects before it Terra Wonder will be completed with a mixture of grants, passion and gifts from our community. On our first weekend out of isolation it feels odd that we’re building a place designed to bring hundreds of children and parents together. But Terra Wonder is an act of faith, a gift, for when we get through this and kids can come out and play together again.