THE green and gold of wattles has regularly been used to identify Australia in international competitions and with good reason - more than 1000 native species of the tree are found all over the continent, covering a wide range of climates and soil types.

But more recently, the iconic Australian tree – also known as Acacia (pronounced ‘uh·kay·shuh’) - has a gathering cohort of farmers and scientists interested in much more than just inspiring the nation’s sporting colours.

Wattle Seeds Australia director, Peter Cunningham’s enthusiasm is infectious about the potential for the familiar legume to play a significant role in food supply here and overseas, and he is keen to see the Hamilton region become known not just for its sheep, but also to be the centre for a wattle harvest industry.

Back in 2000, Mr Cunningham travelled on a missions trip to the Maradi region in Niger, Africa, and saw what was being done with the trees with their seeds employed as a potential human food source; the nation has the world’s highest fertility rate.

Wattles were originally introduced there in the 1970s as windbreaks and fuel wood, were well adapted to the harsh semi-arid conditions in the Sahelian (a belt of land up to 1000 kilometres wide that stretches across North Africa between the Sahara Desert and the Sudanian savanna to the south) and coped well in poor sandy soils - and his experience enabled him to expand on the fledgling work.

“I was an agronomist plant breeder here,” Mr Cunningham said.

“(I) started at the PVI (Pastoral and Veterinary Institute) at Hamilton in 1983, right through to 1996.

“(In Africa) I actually took it a bit further using them not just for human food, but for multipurpose trees in farming systems.”

Wattles are in the same plant family as chickpeas and lentils, and over Mr Cunningham’s subsequent 13 years of trips back to Niger and other African countries such as Tunisia, Ethiopia, Ghana and Senegal, he was convinced leveraging the plant for similar purposes here locally was not just feasible but largely untapped and very exciting.

“I’ve been living here at Tarrington - I’ve been harvesting wattles for seed around the district for three or four years from about 2014 on,” he said.

“So that gave me an idea of the wattles that grew well and produced a lot of seed in naturalised (species), so I selected those five or six to grow up into orchards here.”

“In 2018 I established Wattle Seeds Australia as a trading name and launched that business, so I’ve been full time since then.”

The last four years he’s spent as a consultant including helping farmers grow them, whether their operation was large or small.

Field Day

The interest has been so great that last week’s two-day local field and seminar wattle seed production event he helped organise ended up being fully booked and had to turn people away.

“It was a wonderful gathering of my network and even beyond that,” Mr Cunningham said.

“It just shows the interest that’s there, we had to cut the numbers off at 55 two weeks before the event.

“It was a really great cross-section (of people, including) a few new people from the district and then other growers from outside the district - some newer folk like one guy doing extracts work in Ballarat, another CSIRO lady in from Werribee looking at the chemical composition of seeds.

“(Also) a Queensland Uni group came down from their lab; we’d contracted them a year ago to do a lot of analysis of the wattle seeds for their nutritive value (for) eating and any toxins.

“There were some chefs, marketers, environmental people - even Wannon Water came out, they’ve got some real interest in this space.”

The field day involved travelling across several local farms in the district, and The Spectator dropped in on the last stop for the day at Bruce Burger’s farm in Victoria Valley, where he shared about his own experience utilising a sandy soil section of his property to grow about 1500 trees and six different species.

Mr Burger told the group he was “talked into putting them in” and they were more work than he’d anticipated, but “you learn something in field days” and was happy to contribute his own experience with pruning, row arrangements and soil types.

“First, I planned for width,” he said.

“I’ve pruned each year for the last two years.

“You just need a space between your rows to get your harvester through. I’m thankful I kept my old ute, I just pushed my way through, I don’t care about the duco.”

Mr Burger said setbacks such as losing a handful of trees in one small section with a salinity soak “seeping out of the soil” ultimately became minor hurdles to overcome with more salt-tolerant species successfully replacing the losses.

But with his increasing understanding of how to manage them, he was very happy with how they worked well in what Mr Cunningham called “degraded land” that might otherwise struggle to grow good pasture.

“You put them on your poorest land, and they’ll give you a good return,” Mr Cunningham said.

“It’s certainly the case for me,” Mr Burger said.

“It (the soil) was certainly unproductive and low in fertility, and yet the trees have done really well.”

Glenthompson farmer, Marcus Gellert, also spoke to the interested crowd of his journey with growing wattles for about four years alongside his stock.

“We’re predominantly a sheep farm, about 7000 sheep at the moment,” he said.

“We decided to have a crack at it and so we put two and a half hectares of wattles in.

“We had really good survival rate; I agree with Bruce, it’s been a lot more work than we expected and if we knew that, we may or may not have gone ahead, but I’m still glad we have.

“Really what it’s showing us is we would like to mechanise things a little bit more.”

Mr Gellert spoke of some of the different species he was growing and how increasing shelter - “the farm basically had no trees or shelter on it when I was a kid” - had also informed his decision-making.

“We’ve got nearly 2000 acacia trees in two and a half hectares. We have seven varieties … we’ve mainly got baileyana, which is the Cootamundra wattle, and longifolia Sallow wattle, and a fair few of the pycnantha Golden wattle.

“I definitely wanted a lot of baileyana tree because we’ve got a lot of shelterbelt type plantations and they’ve performed very well.

“I think we’ve seen enough promise to know that this is worth looking at very seriously.”

Attending the event from a long distance away was South Australian farmer, Lyndon Dempsey; a builder for 20 years he transitioned to farming over a decade ago and now enthused about growing wattles in the Flinders Ranges area as “the best office I could ever ask for”.

“It’s the hardest job I’ve ever done but it’s the most rewarding – and there lies the enjoyment,” he said.

“Especially when you see the trees, you watch them blossom, you grow the pods.

“Through necessity I had to build my own seed cleaner and that was the ‘pièce de résistance’ for me … there’s no better feeling than running your hand through clean seed.”

Wattle seeds as food and profit

Mr Cunningham said the nutritional value of wattle seeds compared very well with other legumes but first required a process of eliminating proteinase inhibitors “naturally in the legumes” that was as simple as a light roast “for four to five minutes at 180 degrees Celsius”.

“What the roasting does is softens that seed coat so they can be ground up,” he said.

“It brings out the flavour (with a) similar principle to coffee beans.

“It’s a very versatile seed for lots of applications in the food industry. There’s expanding markets - there’s real interest in the unique flavour.”

Underscoring this was the menu the group enjoyed for dinner the evening after the field day, which Mr Sutherland described as “unbelievable” with about a dozen different recipes.

“People just couldn’t believe it,” he said.

“It was one of the highlights. (There was) eight different wattle species involved in that menu.”

Mr Cunningham said the yield from wattle trees - “half to one tonne per hectare of seed” - was not as great in volume as other legumes but this was more than made up by the fact they were so hardy and didn’t require annual resowing.

“It’s lower than lentils or chickpeas, but we can’t grow those down this way,” he said.

“(But) remember, you don’t have to keep planting a crop every year, it’s a perennial tree crop.”

Mr Cunningham said he was grateful for the support he has received from the Southern Grampians Shire as they contributed to the event on top of an Australian Government National Landcare grant.

“The Hamilton region has become one of the key hubs for wattle seed production in the country,” he said.

Mr Burger said the field day was a great idea and hoped the production would continue to increase and garner the interest of some larger food industry labels to explore the marketing potential.

“I found (the day) very informative and pleasing,” he said.

“It’s good to see that sort of interest. There’s a feel-good factor with growing native food, you just feel good about it.

“If there was a good supply, some of the bigger companies would be more interested in in doing something with them.”