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Wednesday, October 5, 2016
Locally owned and proudly independent
Come on, guys ‘n gals! CONNIE and Trevor Duncan want to take you for a trip down memory lane. The bubbly couple (pictured) are helping to organise Atherton Rotary Club’s inaugural Igloo Ball, with a 1940s theme to boot. The fundraiser will go towards restoring the building to its former wartime glory, with live music and raffle prizes set to get locals excited for this weekend.
After another panama disease scare, farmers tell authorities to...
Get it right By Michael Serenc
INDUSTRY leaders have demanded Biosecurity Queensland (BQ) not botch their testing of another Far North banana farm for Panama disease after a misdiagnosis pushed a Mareeba farmer to the brink. BQ announced last week they were in the process of testing samples taken from a Tully banana farm for Panama disease tropical race 4 after the landowner reported “unusual symptoms” in his banana plants. The threat of a positive diagnosis has put the Australian Banana Growers Council’s (ABGC’s) planned $3.3 million purchase of a Panamainfected Tully Valley farm in doubt until the test
results are known. Mareeba farmer Mark Reppel was forced to shut down his banana plantation in April last year for five weeks after Biosecurity Queensland (BQ) claimed the property had been infected by Panama. The quarantine was subsequently lifted last June after BQ admitted the initial diagnosis was wrong, blaming one of their testing methods, Dita PCR, for the false positive. While Dita PCR is no longer used by BQ for Panama disease testing, Mr Reppel lost a fortune in production costs during the quarantine. ABGC chairman Doug Phillips said while he was hopeful testing would return a negative result for Panama, it was critical BQ not put another
farm through unnecessary hardship. “We don’t want anything like that to happen again,” he said. “But we’ve got to trust in BQ to run their diagnostics. They have reviewed their processes considerably since that time and we’ll just let them do their job.” Mr Phillips urged all banana farmers to remain vigilant. “Those on-farm biosecurity measures that everyone has implemented are still your best defence,” he said. “But this is really just a wait and see game and fingers crossed it will be another negative.” Howe Farming Group environmental officer James Howe, whose father Dennis owns a 600ha
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banana crop at Walkamin, said BQ needed to develop smarter, more cost-effective biosecurity measures. “We’ve just come out of one of the longest and worst financial stretches of banana growing in our history and those biosecurity practices could not have been implemented at a more worse time,” he said. “It’s so expensive and there’s so much more we need to do to secure our properties but we need to do it in a manageable way.” Mr Howe said chemical sterilisation of footwear and vehicle wheels was “very expensive in the long term” for farmers, with property isolation, while also expensive, the best method of minimising the risk of Panama infection. ►P3
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