Nutella - Produced from Australian Hazelnuts Soon

Nutella is a speciality food spread well liked by kids and adults alike.  And hazelnut chocolates are also a bit of a treat.  More of these will be locally produced over the next few years as new production of hazelnut trees start bearing nuts.

A new agricultural industry is emerging in Australia with more than two hundred thousand hazelnut trees now successfully imported from Chile.

Minister for Agriculture, Barnaby Joyce, said a second consignment of hazelnut trees cleared quarantine on 27 November 2013 thanks to several years of careful planning to ensure biosecurity risks associated with the introduction of new planting stock were managed.

“This sort of collaboration, between government and the horticulture industry, is a model other sectors could draw on if looking to create new agricultural industries and products in Australia,” Minister Joyce said.

“This is a good example of a committed importer who was willing to work through our biosecurity requirements in order to establish a sustainable industry here.

 “Their perseverance has created an opportunity for some of our farmers to diversify and grow this alternative crop, increasing their farm-gate returns and positively impacting their local communities.”

The Department of Agriculture has worked closely with scientists from the NSW Department of Primary Industries, the Chilean quarantine service and the Australian importer—Agri Australis, part of the Ferrero Group—to import the high-quality hazelnut trees.

The consignments of Chilean hazelnut trees were placed in mandatory quarantine and screened for pests and diseases of biosecurity concern. This group of trees now joins the first consignment which was released from quarantine at the end of last year, and will be planted near Narrandera, in NSW.

 Agri Australis General Manager, Alessandro Boccardo, said working through the biosecurity requirements had been important to fulfilling the business objective – to develop a reliable Southern Hemisphere supply to ensure counter seasonal availability of a high quality standard.

 “The intention is to develop a large scale hazelnut demonstration farm near Narrandera in the Riverina– planting a million trees over 2000 hectares – that will demonstrate the sustainability and profitability of the hazelnut business to Australian farmers and potential investors.

 “By 2022 the modelling forecasts about 5000 tonnes of hazelnuts will be harvested from the demonstration farm – and we’re hoping local growers can match that volume in the medium term,” Mr Boccardo said.  Ferrero, through Agri Austraia is keen to assist other local growers to also plant hazelnuts and to be part of the project to boost Australian sourced nut product for their Nutella production facility in the Sydney area.

 The hazelnut project highlights the role biosecurity plays in facilitating the safe entry of new plant and animal material to improve the competitiveness of Australia’s agricultural industries.

 The department’s role is to protect Australia’s biosecurity status and the environment from pests and diseases, and this underpins the productivity of our primary industries.

 Agri Australis was presented with a Biosecurity Award from the Department of Agriculture for its collaborative approach to meeting Australia’s biosecurity requirements.

Potential New Cacao Varieties

Do you like chocolate? Delicious not so sweet dark chocolate?

Over the past few years we have seen increases in interest in wine varieties, followed by new and different olive oil flavours. Coffee is going the same way, with new blends, varieties and types offered in the market place, to titillate and entrance consumers and coffee lovers.

Watch this space..........chocolate may be next!

Recently reports of work by USDA staff in conjunction with several other agencies as well as commercial choclate company partners have been chasing new and different types of cacao.......the source tree for chocolate.

While West Africa is the source of much of the world supply of cacao, the centre of diversity is actually in south America, and up into lower central america, areas now being investigated for additional genetic diversity in cacao.

The researchers found hundreds of new cacao tree samples during the trips. One of these, discovered by collaborators from Maranon Chocolate, was Pure Nacional, an old, very rare, and highly coveted variety that has garnered a great deal of interest from makers of fine-flavoured chocolates. Chocolate is produced from cacao.

This industry covets new and unique flavour sources.

Usually, cacao trees are found along rivers, but these gems were found at a higher altitude than normal, and in Peru instead of Ecuador or Venezuela.

The industry flourished in Africa as commercial plantation trees in the new World succumbed to some nasty plant diseases. These new collections may offer some advantages for Peru to create a niche industry for the new cacao varieties.

CHOCOLATE TAX??

Here in Australia, chocolate eggs are very common gifts at Easter, with the egg representing life, as shown by the Christian festivity of the Resurrection, on what is celebrated as Easter sunday.

There has been a call by Tim Costello, the head of World Vision Australia for a tax on chocolate.



No, it is not a crazy thing, but all about the fact that much of the world's chocolate production comes from west Africa, where child slavery and related systems of indentured or sold adult slaves, do much of the work in cocoa production. it is estimated that about 97% of cocoa produced around the world involves child exploitation.


There have been some efforts to overcome the system with Greens chocolate [ based in the UK]attempting to break out of this production cycle, by introducing fair trade type policies around cocoa sales and purchases [ recently written about in Time Magazine], as have Cadbury's.








But the call from Tim Costello is new, and World Vision does have some clout in these issues. Read and hear more here -http://www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/stories/2011/3196200.htm .


It is not a nice issue to contemplate in a comfortable westernised society, but cocoa production does remain as one of the last areas of serious child slavery in the world.


Be aware of that fact as you eat your chocolate Easter eggs............or just about any other chocolate!!

Biodiesel Chocolate Truck - Off to Timbuktu

Willie Wonka and the Chocolate (biodiesel) Truck

SOURCE: http://www.triplepundit.com

Two men left England last Friday on their way to Timbuktu in a truck powered by chocolate.

For the sake of accuracy, the truck is powered with biodiesel fuel made from “waste chocolate” (I never knew there was such a thing as waste chocolate!).

Leaving from England on a ferry across the English channel, the team of Andy Pag and John Grimshaw plan to make their 4.500 mile journey in approximately three weeks.

Using cocoa butter extracted from a confectioner’s misshapen chocolate “rejects”, the truck will carry 454 gallons of biodiesel fuel. The Ford Iveco Cargo truck is carrying two smaller vehicles for the final hard slog across the Sahara desert, all powered with standard engines fueled with biodiesel. The final cost of the fuel is calculated at about $1.16 per gallon.

Carbon Neutral All the Way to Timbuktu

The trip is billed as the first carbon neutral journey across the Sahara desert. To achieve that neutrality, the pair will offset the carbon produced from the journey by delivering a biofuel processing unit built upon their arrival in Mali. The device is built by Ecotek in the UK, the same company that designed the process to convert the chocolate bits to biofuel.

The processing unit will be delivered directly to Mali-Folkecenter (MFC), a charity organization that works with developing enterprise in rural and under served communities through environmental and renewable energy projects. The biodiesel processor will be used by local woman to convert waste cooking oil into fuel, bring in some supplemental income, employ two technicians, and provide low carbon fuel for local vehicles.

Ostensibly, the purpose of the trip is to encourage Peg and Grimshaw’s fellow Britons to use biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuel.

I don’t believe all biofuels are “created equal” or are a panacea or total solution to our dependence on fossil fuel (see my earlier post on the subject), but developing a process that converts waste chocolate into fuel serves as another example of how innovative thinking can help pave the way to viable alternative solutions to fossil fuel use. The road to good ideas sometimes leads to unexpected places, powered by creative thinking and, well, chocolate!

Follow the team’s progress at biotruck.co.uk and keep on trucking