Little Bunyip

Thoughts on leaving Tamara Cooperative and the Desert Fruit Company

So we are leaving Tamara. It seems very strange to have just spent two years setting up the Cooperative and building up the Desert Fruit Company and then to leave. I guess it is. But it also feels like the right thing to do because it just ain’t working. I hated all those people who told us not to set up a collaborative structure when we started but here I am walking away from the two hardest working years of my life and a farming business which has doubled its turnover because of it – so let me explain why.

Chris and I have spent a goodly few years pondering the real estate section of the Centralian Advocate and building amazing gardens at rental houses. I don’t want to deter you from building a garden or improving the place you rent but it is depressing to go back over and see half the trees you’ve planted dead, the soil (and the worms) dried out and crusted and the couch grass taking over again. We wanted something that was ours but we couldn’t quite hack the thought of a 400K mortgage to buy a piece of ground in Alice Springs. You could buy a fully operational small vineyard down south for that and surely the housing bubble was going to burst soon anyway?

Then Chris met Dave who was offering to give an operational date farm to a group of people who wanted to have a go of running a farm and living out bush. I remember saying to Geoff at his nursery one Wednesday afternoon “I think when someone offers to give you a farm you should say yes because it will probably only happen once in your life”. So we did. We worked with Dave and two others to set up a non trading cooperative to hold the title of the land and a subsidiary company to run the business. We would all have an equal say in how the cooperative ran (one member one vote) and after Dave retired, the remaining four of us would have an equal say in how the business was run.

Sounds great? In theory. But in my heart I knew that working with two of the other three people involved in the Co-op was not going to work for me. I knew! But I thought if we created a really robust structure with good decision making processes we could make a go of it. What I have now realised is that no matter how good your structure is, if you’re marching to the beat of a different drum it is really hard to do anything. And like David Holgren observes, the default position of groups that can’t decide what to do is to do nothing. He really does make some astute observations.

We could have worked longer and harder at making our processes better, got mentoring – all of that. But I was in tears after every meeting with frustration and anger wondering how on earth we could make this work. Were we being bullies or were we just holding our ground? Was I being unreasonable or just going after what I wanted? It seemed like Chris and I were pushing shit uphill whatever spin you wanted to put on it. How many freaking meetings could we keep having where three of us agreed (quorum), one person disagreed and then we couldn’t move forward because they wouldn’t let it go? It seemed like we managed to make some progress with the Cooperative but Company meetings filled me with dread.

What I realised was that ultimately I don’t want to run a farm collaboratively. I want to run my farm and collaborate with other people to do so. So really the only reason I was at Tamara was to have access to the farm because I thought I couldn’t afford to buy my own piece of land. It wasn’t because I wholeheartedly wanted to participate in slowly building up a cooperative business with all the long meetings and patience that entails. Nope. I want build up a super fantastic farming business that improves the land its on, earns me a living, puts me in touch with people who totally inspire me – where I wake up excited about what I’m doing every day and have the freedom to experiment without having to run it past people at the next board meeting. Which brings me to my next point:

Alongside the attraction of essentially getting a free farm (or at least access to it), was my doubt that I could actually run a farm. Or that Chris and I could run a farm. Could we work together? Would we enjoy it?

What I can now say is that we are more than capable of running a smallish farm and that we’re quite good at running a business together too. Plus that we actually enjoy doing it and want to do it again.

Learning that we can totally run a farm and earn a living from it is the greatest gift of this whole experience. It is the thing which has made the whole endeavour worthwhile. The pleasure I have gained from improving what we started with, talking to people about how to do things, having a go at doing things, learning about all the amazing, inspiring things people are doing all over the place makes me want to have a place to put into place all this learning and energy in the long term. So now we just need to do it. And I actually believe that we can do it. But what we needed to get to this point was to know what we actually wanted.

Now, I am not about to preach to you about the power of manifestation but I do think there is a lot to be said for knowing what you want. Part of the reason Chris and I stayed at Tamara for so long was because it was so close to what we wanted. It was a functioning farm, in a beautiful place near all our friends in Alice, dates are in demand and we could set the price for them, we could farm without being crippled by debt…. Yet we knew also that it wasn’t quite working and we spent innumerable afternoons drinking tea and trying to think about how we could restructure the Company to make it work for us and still be fair to the current and future members of the Cooperative. But it wasn’t till we spent an afternoon having a first crack at putting together a holistic goal that I think we started to move towards actually articulating what we wanted.

Goal setting and especially holistic goal setting is a slow process and I admit that Tamara has had to wear a few permutations of us trying to work out what we wanted. Eventually we wrote to the Cooperative proposing that we buy the Company from the Cooperative and run it as our own enterprise, leasing the date orchard area from the Cooperative. We said we wanted a 50 year lease which we could on-sell to another party, the ability to build a house on the orchard site, the ability to plant trees, harvest date suckers, host workers, WWOOFers, friends and family and a bunch of other things. In short, we proposed to the Cooperative that they lease the land to us for a very long time and allow us to run the date farm as if it were our own.

The Cooperative said, no, we wont give you a 50 year lease.

We said, okay, we’re leaving the Cooperative.

We knew what we wanted, we asked for it and the Coop said no. It made the decision very straightforward.

I am still very sad about having to leave and sad that we have to say goodbye to the coolibahs in the creek and the cob wall built by my brother and his mates and the beautiful stone pad built by my mum and dad and the excellent tank stand build by our Alice friends. But if I can’t get what I ultimately want from being there, then why would I stay?

For the record, I think it is a crying shame that the Cooperative said no to our offer, especially the length of the lease. I think we could have made the farm totally amazing, given the Cooperative an annual income from rent payments and opened the place up to more people as we built up the business and made it a thriving, exciting place for people to come to in Central Australia. I think that having a viable commercial enterprise which values sustaining and improving the land it stands on would be an incredible centre-piece for Tamara Cooperative. But these are just my ideas and they are not the majority ideas of the Cooperative at this point in time. That’s okay. It just means that we will go after what we want some place else.

What next?

Chris and I will still be working down at Tamara for the next month, finishing off the date season and trying to make sure we can pay ourselves (and the others) back the money we have put into the business.  And after we’ve had a bit of a holiday, we will work backwards from the goal of owning our own astonishingly fabulous farm and earning a living from producing food to the smaller steps of how to actually get there. And if anyone is interested in joining Tamara Cooperative, I hear they’re recruiting new members…..

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