Macadamia Nut Hut is a small family run business owned by Ben Smith & Kylie Parker, located on 78 acres of picturesque countryside in the hinterlands of northern New South Wales.
Why Macadamias?
We decided to start selling Macadamia nuts as our family and friends were constantly asking where they could purchase them from around northern New South Wales.
We saw an opportunity to supply them ourselves and market our own range of flavoured nuts. This resulted in the birth of Macadamia Nut Hut!
We wanted our customers to be able to order premium quality Macadamia nuts from the comfort of their own home and have them delivered Australia wide.
Regenerating our Macadamia farm
Back in 2018 is when we purchased what was then a run down Macadamia farm in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales.
The farm was established in the early 2000’s, by an older couple who grafted and planted each and every tree carefully by hand.
Over the last three years we have worked tirelessly to bring the trees back to good health and prepare the other areas for replanting.
We have since pulled out and mulched approximately five hundred trees by hand before seeking the assistance of machines.
We tried to complete as much of the work ourselves to reduce costs, but the manual labour was taking a toll on us as well as our family unit.
Whilst both our young children love working the farm, riding motorbikes and generally being outdoors, we were all starting to tire.
Spending over an hour on a Saturday morning removing and chipping ten trees was the breaking point for us.
With about three hundred more trees that needed removal for the upcoming planting we just couldn’t cope.
We ended up seeking the assistance of a local business, who with an excavator and a forestry mulcher was able to remove and mulch a tree in fifteen seconds!
We had to accept that horsepower beats manpower that day and in just ten hours, the excavator was able to remove just shy of two thousand trees that remained on our property and we were finally ready for the next step of the planting process!
So in September 2021 we spent the morning watching a machine plant eight hundred trees accurately via GPS.
We would have been able to plant approximately fifty trees a day. So over a fortnights worth of work was shortened to just three hours. Those other days can now be spent enjoying time with our two boys…
