The plots are on the eastern half of the island and the path to them was sand. In the wet season a loaded trailer could not make it, which meant crates were carried the last three hundred metres by hand, in the rain, before five in the morning.
The track is nine hundred metres of compacted coral with a crowned surface, wide enough for the tractor and trailer, with drainage cuts at the two low points and a turning place at the far end.
What it changed is easy to measure. Before the track, a grower working the far plots could get about eight crates to the loading point in a morning. Now the tractor makes two runs and takes forty, and it does that for every plot rather than only for the growers with a wheelbarrow and a son.
The drainage cuts were added after the first wet season, when two hundred metres of the new surface washed into the plots below. That was the council's mistake, it was said at the meeting, and the repair was paid for out of the following year's maintenance rather than pretended away.
The track is graded once a year after the wet season and the council does it with a borrowed blade, which costs three days of the tractor and is the cheapest maintenance in the budget.
