A sweet family business
FOURTH generation Tweed Coast cane farmer, Scotty Hawken is seven weeks into the six month harvest on his family farm.
While Mr Hawken is doing his best to get 42,000 tonnes of cane cut on time, he said he wouldn't be doing anything else.
"If your mum makes pancakes, you make pancakes. If I stop doing it I would sort of be letting down all of my past generations, so I just keep doing it," he said. Mr Hawken said the Tweed was a perfect location for growing cane as livestock was not a viable option due to flooding.
For cane farmers, flooding isn't too much of an issue except for when they find an unexpected surprise among their crops. "We see stuff that floats in there after it floods like fridges and I found some goats in there one day, but there's always foxes, bandicoot, hares and heaps of rats," he said.
