The buckwheat in your product was grown in China under fully accredited organic certification. While the level of pollution visible in China’s many cities gives many cause to doubt the ‘organic’ status of Chinese farmers, you can be assured that our suppliers, who source the farmers to supply them, adhere to strict requirements. They even go beyond these requirements, using heavy metal detectors to ensure their grains aren’t laden with heavy metals from air pollution.
We always prefer to support Australian farmers and produce, however due to bad weather (drought or sometimes too much rain at the wrong time) these crops can fail, sometimes several years in a row. This can be financially devastating for farmers – you can imagine the impact on any small business sustaining total loss of your stock multiple years in a row.
Farmers who grow buckwheat for us can suffer reduced yields when the summer is too dry and hot. This season many farmers were unable to plant buckwheat crops due to the soil being too dry.
The fact that buckwheat is a summer crop can be part of the problem in Queensland. While the crop likes warmth, summer also tends to be the rainy season in the northern part of Australia. This means that every time a farmer plants his summer crops (eg: buckwheat, millet) he runs the risk of loosing the lot to floods or excessive rain. Or of not getting enough summer rain for the crop to survive. Rainfall can’t be predicted with any accuracy more than a week or two out, so, if there’s enough moisture in the soil, it’s a case of plant and cross your fingers. As you can imagine, people on the land spend a lot of time listening to weather reports!
The outcome of a shortfall in the buckwheat yield is that we must source it elsewhere.
This is why we have found a reliable organic source for this product in China, until such time as our farmers get a turn of luck.
Location of the buckwheat farms in China:
Jianping county Liaoning Province
