As he watches freshly harvested bananas roll into the packing shed, far north Queensland banana grower James Howe cannot believe how far and in how many directions the fruit travels to reach consumers
Key points:
- Some of banana grower James Howe’s produce travels over 6,000km from on-farm to supermarket shelves
- Bananas are Australia’s top-selling supermarket product
- The Australian Banana Growers Council says the logistical challenges of getting bananas into homes are immense
The bananas are packed into 15-kilogram cartons, stacked up and chilled overnight before heading out on the trucks down the east coast and as far as Derby in Western Australia.
From the Howe farm in Walkamin in the Tablelands region near Cairns, some of these bananas might just set the record for the longest plantation-to-plate journey in the entire country.
“One of our main customers is Perth, so we’ve got one of the [longest] freight routes out of most people in Australia,” he said.
“Once they hit Perth, they then bounce up the west coast and it’s nearly as quick to get to where they end up from where they started.”
From Walkamin to Perth and up to Derby it is a whopping 6,880 kilometres.
To put the distance into context, it would be the same as a meandering road trip through 16 European countries, starting in Spain and finishing in Russia.
Mr Howe says his nonna could never have envisaged the distances his produce travels, when she and his grandfather started growing melons, tobacco, and pumpkins in Queensland many years ago.
Thousands of kilometres later and still fresh
More than five million bananas are eaten every day in Australia, making