Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/111460
industryfocus Fast Fact can be sold. Mulla hasn't had a bite for three years. He's hoping for $2 million, which will be split among the 249 shareholders. "It's not a matter of getting rich," he admits. Farming remains a viable industry in the area, says Gaye Taylor, a councillor at Tablelands Regional Council, thanks to the Mareeba–Dimbulah irrigation channel system from Tinaroo dam, which was paid for by the tobacco farmers "back in the day". "Ex-tobacco farmers have moved on from the good old days of knowing they could sell their tobacco via a guaranteed quota system, year in and year out," Taylor says. "These days, even with their extensive farming experience and knowledge of the sandy loam soils of the area, farmers have to work harder and gamble on what best to grow without the security of knowing they will recover their costs at harvest time." With horticulture (and livestock) slowly coming into the area, citrus fruits, pawpaws and avocados are now big here. Sugar cane has also been introduced with some success, and the children of former tobacco farmers still farm in the region, however, they have diversified into other crops. Frank Pozzebon is among them. His father arrived in Australia in 1958 and moved to Dimbulah in the 1960s. He bought a property in the 1970s and grew tobacco. Today, mangoes are Pozzebon's primary income and he has diversified into hay. The change didn't happen overnight, though. "For a long time they told us to diversify out of tobacco because it was like sitting on a fence," he recalls. "As the years went on, we planted more and more mango trees." It has worked out okay for Pozzebon, but "I won't retire a millionaire," he says. Tobacco provided certainty to a point, he adds. "If it kept on going the way it was, a lot of farmers would have stopped growing tobacco anyway. Since the demise of the tobacco industry, farms have been bought and sold." Hobby farms are on the rise, owned by professionals who come and go. Tobacco was good to Mareeba. Its once-dirt streets are now paved and its children have been put through university and are set up in the cities. Today, while a former tobacco farm yields tropical fruit for the Japanese gift market, other farms around the area are abandoned and derelict. "It's a shame, because the tobacco industry made this whole area flourish," Maloberti says, "but slowly, slowly it was strangled." 68 Tobacco belongs to the Solanaceae ('deadly nightshade') family of flowering plants, which includes other agricultural crops such as tomato, potato, capsicum and eggplant.