By Phil Jarratt
Becky Dart’s Big Heart Bamboo may not have won the recent Weekly Times Coles 2020 Farmer of the Year award – it was a highly-praised finalist – but with the edible bamboo shoot market rising as fast as the bamboo itself as chefs look for a competitive edge, and cooks at home loving her range of gourmet bamboo condiments, Big Heart looks like having a very big year.
No surprises here. It’s in her blood. While Becky is a fairly recent entrant into the gourmet foods market, she grew up on a Belli Park property (west of Eumundi) hearing the magical sounds of the bamboo stands creaking and groaning in the breeze, speaking to her father as he worked in the shade of his natural cathedrals. “I’m here, I’m growing!”
Durnford Dart, now 84, laughs at the memory of his imagined conversations with bamboo, first revealed nearly a quarter of a century ago when our family-run magazine, Noosa Blue, ran an article on his relatively new Bamboo Australia plantation and nursery. Back then, he was the Australian pioneer of this remarkably versatile and sustainable crop, and he remains the patriarch of the Dart house of bamboo, although Becky, 36, is now making edible bamboo her own.
He also has impressive credentials as one of the bamboo world’s leading gurus, thanks in part to his late ‘90s Bamboo Handbook, published around the world, his consultancy work for major Third World sustainability projects, and his service on the boards of several international industry associations. In a major report on the global bamboo industry last year, Researchandmarkets.com named Belli’s tiny Bamboo Australia as one of the top 25 players in the world.
Durnford (“Durn” to his mates, including many members of the Noosa Yacht and Rowing Club, where he was commodore for five years) first became enchanted by bamboo as a little boy, walking through Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens with his mum while dad was away at World War II. He says: “I was only six or seven, but I remember seeing this amazing thing hanging over the pathway, quite beautiful. The impression stayed with me, and when dad came home from the war, and we sold up in Melbourne and moved to a farm on the NSW central coast, I was delighted to find that our neighbours had a stand of bamboo, and we’d go in there and cut it to make fishing rods and kites.”
Much later in life, Durnford had a successful wrecking yard and auto parts business in western Sydney when he stumbled into a huge bamboo grove while on a business trip to Japan. He recalls: “A light misty rain started and it was so peaceful and quiet in there that I thought I should try to grow this stuff at home. I already had 40 hectares of land here at Belli Park, so I did a bit of research and decided that bamboo would be feasible to grow, initially for the edible shoots. I saw an opportunity because there were no fresh shoots being marketed in Australia, they were a prohibited import as a green product, and there was a growing demand for them. So that added up to a business plan.”
There are 1500 species of bamboo and Durnford researched about 60 of them that would potentially thrive in the subtropical climate of the Sunshine Coast, but since about half weren’t available in Australia, he went looking for them in China and Thailand. He says: “About half of the half I imported survived a very strict quarantine, then the neighbours wanted my bamboo declared a noxious weed, so I had to fight them and the government for two years. The odds were stacked against me, but eventually, in the early ‘90s, we started production of edible shoots, with poles as a sideline, but the poles turned out to be the major seller.”
This was just as well, because growers on the Adelaide River in the Northern Territory swamped the shoots market and the price slumped. The incredible diversity of bamboo would become the heart of his business, but back then it was almost his undoing. “I was spread too thin with poles, nursery plants and developing benchtops and flooring products, and I took my eye off the ball with the shoots, and we had to let it go,” he says. It’s taken a generation and a quarter of a century, but the edible shoots are back big time, and may well be the future of the Dart family bamboo enterprises.
Becky Dart confesses she wasn’t very interested in bamboo as a child, despite, or perhaps because of, growing up in a grove. Her real love was wildlife, and after finishing an applied science degree at the University of Queensland, she travelled in Asia, working with the tiny elephant population, almost wiped out as a result of massive deforestation. This in turn led her to the deforestation of bamboo and the effects that was having. When she came home to Belli and took a temporary job with her dad, she thoroughly researched all aspects of bamboo so she’d know what she was talking about when trying to make sales.
She says: “The more research I did, the more I began to understand dad’s passion for bamboo, and to share it. There’s a greater focus on sustainability and demand has increased for food sources and building materials that are eco-friendly and sustainable. Bamboo ticks every box. It’ll last forever, it creates habitat, it sequesters 150 percent more carbon than an equivalent broadleaf forest, and you never have to till the soil and release carbon.”
Becky’s eyes light up. “I kept learning about all these great things, and that got me into shoots. I started to become passionate about edible bamboo and I got where dad was coming from. I researched the health benefits for humans and found that there were 25 different vitamins and minerals, plus really high fibre so good for gut health. It also has aphrodisiac qualities. Bamboo is a remedy for the planet!”
While Becky was having these revelations, Durnford was plodding along with about a million applications for his crops, including providing green pole fencing for festivals such as Woodford and Womadelaide, building two kilometres of fencing in dry Blackwater to settle the dust around mining camps, circling caravan parks at Noosa North Shore and Yeppoon to cleanse effluent, and sending poles to three Australian station in Antarctica for biodegradable expedition markers.
The range of bamboo applications is quite staggering (I’m wearing a bamboo tee shirt as I write) but little is known about the true size of the industry, in Australia or globally. A 2012 study by Business Insider estimated a global market of $25 billion, but last year Researchandmarkets.com had it at $90 million in 2019 and growing at 5.5 percent. That’s quite a discrepancy, and probably indicative of statisticians playing catch-up with an evolving, although ancient industry. Durnford Dart says that in Australia it is almost impossible to package all of bamboo’s applications under one figure. He estimates a few million for nursery plants and about the same for poles. Fortunately, there are only about five serious players in Queensland, and while he shares the plants business, he owns the poles.
Whatever the real numbers are, a big chunk of the future is going to belong to the gourmet foods sector. Says Becky: “When dad did the shoots first time around the market was nothing like it is now. I think social media has created a much greater awareness that you can use locally grown bamboo shoots in your cooking rather than the tinned stuff from Asia. There’s been a lot of pressure on chefs to stand out from the pack, to find their niche, and using fresh bamboo shoots has really made a difference for some of them. Locally, it’s changed a lot from when there was just a very small market for fine dining restaurants like Wasabi. Now there’s Asian and fusion cuisine everywhere and they’re all looking for that point of difference.”
Although Wasabi has sadly passed into Noosa’s culinary history, executive chef Zeb Gilbert remains a satisfied customer of Big Heart at exclusive Makepeace Island. Other restaurants in the region using Becky’s fresh produce include Embassy XO, Sumi Kitchen and Spirit House, where her fragrant bamboo tea has been turned into a cocktail. In Brisbane Donna Chang and Same-Same are on her client list.
For its fresh produce Big Heart Bamboo has been recognised with a Snail of Approval from Slow Food Noosa and was a 2019 and 2020 Queensland winner in the Delicious Produce Awards, but preparation of the edible shoots is long, laborious and labour-intensive, and delivery is usually seasonal, so Becky is focusing on the Big Heart condiment range that now includes pickles, relishes, chutneys, toppings and fragrant refreshing teas, and recently won her first export client.
With the two family businesses working side by side at Belli Park, the future looks good for the Darts’ house of bamboo. Says Becky: “I dream of the day when I don’t have to be the one chopping up the shoots, but we’re not quite there yet.”
