Drive past Belongaben Farm in February and you'd call it a cane farm. Come back in June, when the pecan trees have dropped their leaves and the shakers are working, and you'd call it an orchard. Both are true, and neither is the whole picture.

We grow three crops on this country: sugar cane, soybeans and pecans. People assume that's hedging — three crops so that one bad year doesn't sink us. There's something in that. But the real reason is simpler. Each one does something the others can't, and together they suit this ground better than any of them would alone.

The soil came first.

The Northern Rivers is one of the most fertile stretches of farmland in the country, and that comes down to water. The Clarence, Tweed and Richmond valleys have laid down deep alluvial soils over thousands of years, and the region collects between 1,000 and 2,000 millimetres of rain a year. That's a lot of rain by Australian standards. It's why cane grows here and why the district looks green in a drought year when the rest of the state has gone brown.

Deep alluvial flats are also, as it happens, close to what a pecan tree wants. Pecans need deep, well-drained soil, they put down a taproot early and keep going, and shallow or compacted ground stunts them permanently. You don't get a second attempt at that. The tree you plant is the tree you have for the next eighty years.

Soybeans do the quiet work

Soybeans get the least attention of the three and do some of the most important work. In cane country they're the standard break crop: you plough out old cane, put in a soybean crop, and the legume fixes nitrogen back into the soil while breaking the disease and pest cycles that build up under continuous cane. The following cane plant goes in stronger.

They're also a crop we can sell. That's not nothing — a break crop that pays for itself is a rare thing in farming.

Pecans are the long game

The cane and the soybeans turn over on a cycle of months and years. The pecans work on a completely different clock.

A pecan orchard doesn't start producing until around year eight and doesn't reach full production until somewhere between years twelve and fifteen. The trees themselves can reach twenty to forty metres, with trunks up to two metres across. These are forest trees. Planting them is less like sowing a crop and more like building something.

That's the part people find hardest to get their heads around. When you plant cane, you're thinking about next winter. When you plant a pecan, you're thinking about a harvest that will happen when your kids are grown.

Three crops, one set of hands

The honest challenge of a mixed farm is that everything wants attention at once, and the machinery bill is three times what it would be for a single enterprise. Cane harvest, soybean harvest and pecan harvest each need their own gear, their own contractors, their own window of weather.

The compensation is that the year has a shape to it. Pecan harvest runs from about March through to June depending on variety, the back end of the wet season into the cool, dry part of the year. There's a rhythm to a farm that has something happening in every season, and after a while you stop being able to imagine it any other way.

If you've ever wondered why an Australian pecan tastes different to the ones in the supermarket, the answer starts here, in the soil, and in the length of time we've been prepared to wait.