So I am still in the city, still working 18-hour days and still no rain on the farm.

Great opening sentence you say....well it's all good. My workload is being shared by my long time friend who has come and joined me in my mission to bring about balance back into the food supply chain. Danni Crowe is not your average hardworking Australian, after one week in the job I feel like I cannot live without her.

Moving up from Melbourne for the position (well we haven't really settled on a title...so basically she is a pseudo me), she has been in the office and at the farmers markets, rising at 3am and working till all is done, as she, like me, reckons even if you only get a few hours sleep, as long as you complete the days work you are ready and raring to go the next 'new' day.

Each day we bulldoze through the workload and each night I sleep so solidly with a sense of traction, of really knowing that these dreams of mine will succeed as now I have the person by my side that won't let me fail.

Yesterday she was up and driving with me to Brisbane to do the highly successful Queen Street Mall Farmers Market and while we were stuck in the 7-8am carpark that is the Pacific Motorway she was informed that she won Best Costume for her group at this year's Mardi Gras.. and we got talking about her group, which upon moving up to Queensland has disbanded after five years, and her reasons for starting the group, which were to show people that you didn't have to run down Oxford Street naked or with feather boas, but you could perform a well rehearsed, decently clad routine with class and dignity. Hearing that, I knew that I had found a person who had the moral backbone that so well fitted my own, but still had an openness and progressive attitude that allowed for an absence of that worst of human traits... ignorance and apathy.

We arrived at Queen Street Mall an hour earlier than usual with another of our trucks in tow and we were set up in half an hour, and boy our site was impressive all ready to trade (mind you, from the moment we arrived we had customers climbing over us to get to the lamb).

Through lunch, the queue stretched twenty and thirty long. Four of us were soldiering away on sausage and lamburger duty and two on fresh meat sales. We didn't stop for four hours. By the end we'd served well over five hundred people.

It was a fantastic effort by the team, which was about to be put to an end...

 ... enter the bureaucrats...

The Queen Street Mall Markets is run by Jan Power, the Tzarina of Farm Sourced Foods, however, it is through Brisbane Marketing that we get the amazing location in the centre of the city.

Here lies the issues....

Due to the huge success of producers like myself who sell cooked, ready-to-eat product, many market stall holders are doing something similar... after all, most people at work want something now, not something to try to keep cool and lug home on public transport after work... so there has been a flurry of stalls doing fresh and ready-to-eat product, which has got the back up of BM who say that it is affecting shop owners.

However, throw into the mix the German Sausage Guy...

So we were all shut down from serving ready-to-eat food for two weeks, which plummeted my sales and made attending the market unviable, as it requires an unviable staff-to-turnover ratio, as most inner city buyers purchase just one or two things, unlike the weekend markets where they stock up for a few weeks...

We started back up last week, which was a massive success after giving away over thirty kilos of taste testers each day that we were unable to sell as product... and mate that is another story!!! 

But the issue is that all the while the German Sausage Guy was able to trade... right opposite the Mall in prime position with like seven hundred staff. I have no issue with the German Sausage Guy...he does a great job, its the moral of it I have the issue with. Now I wouldn't be a farmer if I wasn't whingeing about the unfair playing field going on here.

It beggars belief that at a farmers market a guy like me who breeds his own product, grows his own product, butchers it, and hand makes all our own sausages and products cannot sell, yet a German sausage bloke who does none of the above still can... at a farmers market!!!

Talk about a bizarre and unfair situation. 

And to make matters worse, a German tourist came up after waiting fifteen minutes in our line and asked for sauerkraut on her lamb sausage... I politely told her where to go and informed her that we were Queenslanders and served Queensland style products, which did not include seaweed, sauerkraut or salsa sauce. She took a lamburger... well half a one and said she only wanted to pay $4 instead of $7  so I let her go being in a state of mind of 'im hardly going to argue with a lovely older lady'... well she came back ten minutes later, paid the total amount and did a song and dance that it was the best burger she had ever eaten.

That totally washed away any shittyness I was feeling toward Brisbane Marketing and the German Sausage Guy...who I must say really does have damn good sausages... isn't life just marvellous!