“They were really cool,” enthuses delicious. Harvey Norman Produce Awards judge, Jo Barrett, of Moojepin Foods’s saline food range. “They weren’t acrid or overly drying of the mouth which those products sometimes are,” she says of plants like red and green karkalla, saltbush and samphire. “You could tell that they were grown really well, and we’ve seen them over the years at the delicious. awards, and we’re seeing the range grow,” says Barrett. “It was just so consistent.”

“We’re actually focussing in on salinity issues,” says Lance McLeod, Managing Director of Moojepin Foods. In the vast Western Australian wheatbelt, Moojepin is using saline produce to restore degraded land. McLeod and his business partner, David Thompson, whose farm 20km from Katanning has become the testing ground, have set about cultivating change.

“David’s got about 6500 acres and a 1000 of that in various spots is affected in some way by salinity,” says McLeod. Over four decades Thompson and his family have seen change in the land, says McLeod, every year seeing more acres succumb to man-made salinity.

“It’s those old European farming techniques where they removed all the deep-rooted trees,” says McLeod. “The water has risen to the surface and brought the salt up, and that’s what is slowly increasing salinity.” 

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Efforts to tackle the issue, over decades, have failed, he says. “David saw a use for the land, whereas everyone was trying to work out how do we return it back to what it was, which is nearly impossible unless you replant all the trees over many decades.” A solution that while perhaps preferable is unlikely from a financial point of view. “It’s land that was probably some of the best cropping land and is now worth next to nothing. Instead of trying to treat it as wasted land we thought let’s utilise it and grow things that thrive in that condition.”

Moojepin Foods now has around 20 hectares of product, most of which is saltbush in the ground, and also two 2000 square metre tunnels (with another in the planning stages) which house red and the green karkalla, heart leaf ice plant, sea purslane, sea blight, beach mustard and sea celery.

Years of trial and error have gone into the current range, says McLeod, with tests always underway. They have watched with interest as to how different species adapt, thrive, or fail.

McLeod believes that they are just at the beginning of their journey. “We’re dipping our toes into the water with markets like Singapore and Malaysia. These products work perfectly with seafood and the Asian market is attuned to seafood. But we’ve also got a long way to go to maximise the Australian market.”

Whatever market they see success in, it’s clear that any growth in demand could have a knock-on effect in the wheatbelt. “We see that we’ve got to grow the market so that Malcolm next door can come on board and grow for us, and Tim on the other side,” says McLeod, of their wider vision to not just grow a unique Australian product but to also help restore the land.

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