Good Harvest Organic Farm founder and owner Mick Dan has farming in his DNA.
But despite growing up in the lush Mary Valley on his grandfather’s pineapple farm, he didn’t start his working life in work boots and a wide-brimmed hat.
He’s one of the new-age farmers: young people who begin their careers away from the land but eventually find their way back.
“We skipped a generation, and it nearly skipped me, too,” he said at a Visit Sunshine Coast Meet the Makers tour.
“Both my granddads were farmers and their parents were farmers. My dad decided he didn’t want to be a farmer.
“I vowed I wouldn’t go farming either. I went and got a degree in marine biology and physics. I got into university and I spent 11 years teaching and researching but decided I didn’t want to do (that) anymore.
“(Farming) is in the blood, I think. I do love it. I was lucky enough to have my uni job to be able to support it in its earlier stages to get it up and going, and now it stands on its own as well.
“Training as a scientist, it kind of makes sense because everything we do out here on the farm is science.
“We’re measuring stuff, we’re making changes using chemistry, and biology and physics as well.”
Mick’s way back to farming has its roots in 2009 when he started the Goodliving Food Co-operative at Mudjimba after travelling the world and seeing how other communities fed their residents.
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The goal of the not-for-profit business was to bring together local farmers to do the same on the Coast and, by 2012, the co-op was operating at more than five locations and feeding up to 100 families a week.
The co-op members disbanded the venture two years later for a number of reasons including rising costs but Mick by then was offering a weekly pop-up market stall selling organic produce to students at the University of the Sunshine Coast.
That was the year he and partner Kelly, a former co-op member, and others in the team took over the former Organic Apple store at Marcoola to create the Good Harvest full organic wholefoods marketplace.
As Mick began farming his land at Mount Ninderry, the store was hitting its stride while also delivering mixed seasonal boxes to uni students and customers all over the region.
That was until an arson attack at the end of 2016 destroyed everything in the retail store.
The Good Harvest turning point came after a wedding Mick and Kelly attended in Tasmania soon afterwards where he took the opportunity to visit some organic farms.
“I said to Kel, ‘This is what we need to be doing. We need to be doing more about growing our own food’,” Mick said.
“We’d stepped our toes into the fruit and vege world but I said, ‘We’ve got to grow more’.”
Mick now owns three certified organic farms offering a huge array of market produce that grows in the rich volcanic soil of the Sunshine Coast hinterland – from greens and garlic to strawberries and citrus, ginger and lettuces to brassicas including turnips and broccoli.
“What makes us really different at Good Harvest is that we control all of our own retail,” Mick said.
“So, we send very little away to a wholesale market in Brisbane which I know from my grandparents is why the system is broken
“We run four farmers markets every weekend: at Noosa and Kawana farmers markets, a little one in Marcoola and then we go down to the all-organic market down in Northey Street in Brisbane at Windsor.
“The other side of the business is our boxed delivery business: four or five types of boxes of all the different products that we grow here on the farm but we also source off other locals farms in the region as well.”
Mick said Good Harvest easily would be the biggest organic farm on the Sunshine Coast and definitely the biggest seller of organics in the region.
This self-confessed science geek admits he revels in the annual organic certification process. But what he and his team are most proud of is how much they have educated customers and the wider public about organic produce.
Keeping the soil strong means there is no need for pesticides or herbicides to deal with disease. And the proof of that philosophy is in the produce.
“You can see the really deep green there of this cos lettuce,” said Mick, pointing to 7m long mats growing 200-300 green lettuce and 200-300 red oak lettuce in one row in the field.
“What we’re really aiming for here is a high-nutrition product that’s harvested at a particular perfect time, which is 5 o’clock in the morning when all those nutrients are at the right stage.
“One of the biggest things that sets us apart in our business is that we can have this cos harvested and, within half a day or 24 hours max, we’ve delivered that to somebody’s house in a box.
“In a supermarket, most of your lettuce is already a week old before you’ve even had a chance to look at it.”
While supermarkets had offered consumers convenience, that was at the expense of taste, peak nutritional value and freshness..
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Mick is a big believer in the need to celebrate the seasons, just like any fresh produce community market in Asia or Europe.
“People are so conditioned to be able to walk into a supermarket and get a Valencia orange for 12 months of the year, regardless of the origin of that product; watermelon 12 months of the year.
“Lychees and peaches and nectarines here on the Coast are a month-long thing – six weeks at the most.
“But people want to get them now all the time.
“So, it’s really educating the people and helping them to understand that when they’re on, we’ve got to get in, we’ve got to love them, we’ve got to preserve them and then move on to the next (fruit).”
And one local chef grateful for the time and effort that goes into Good Harvest produce is UK-born James Ostridge, who owns Mill Street Kitchen and Pantry with wife Hayley.
James is a big supporter of local producers – from fruit, veges and artisan items such as relishes sold in his store to the ingredients that go into his rustic-style dishes.
His menus are a celebration of those seasonal offerings.
“It really is second nature to me, being from the UK where we use a lot of our local produce,” he said.
“It’s just a way of connecting with those producers, helping them sell their product.
“And it’s also a bit of a trick not to overdo the dishes. It’s very easy to do too much to this produce. We try not to.”
Many of the ingredients at the media lunch came from the nearby Good Harvest farm including carrots, strawberries, pineapple, ginger, various salad vegetables, turnips and radishes.
One of the particularly tasty dishes was Sunshine & Sons gin-cured salmon (cured in salt and sugar and the gin for two days), carrot top pesto, Ten Acres bread (charcoal and seeded), confit garlic, local pickles and capers. And James’s special dessert was a nod to the parfaits made famous at The Big Pineapple, Woombye.
A total of 23 people are employed in the Good Harvest business, including half-a-dozen drivers for the seasonal, organic fruit and vegetable box deliveries.
“Probably the thing that really saved our business was that we’d just started the online selling through the boxes,” Mick said of the time immediately following the shop fire.
“We probably had 30 boxes back then, four years ago. Up until Covid hit last year, we were probably at 150.
“When Covid first hit in March last year, we doubled our delivery business. It was only the fact that we had everything set up in terms of the online selling, the delivery, the growing the food –everything – that we could actually keep up and look after those customers.
“Long-term, we do want to move into Brisbane. We want to look after Gympie as well.
“We’ve got the systems now. We’ve got the farms.
“There’s not a whole lot stopping us from taking this amazing Sunshine Coast product and feeding it out through Brisbane through our farm to door, seasonal, organic box delivery system.”
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Mick and Kelly are also in the early stages of planning their legacy project which will develop a network of next-generation farmers across the region.
Future Harvest Farmer Foundation will be a sustainable scholarship program of support, mentorship, education and funding to enable the establishment of more small-scale certified organic farms.
Through multiple funding models, this foundation will become a self-supporting, member-led incubator for certified organic, regenerative agricultural farmers and farms to overcome barriers to entry for new farmers.
