After the timber cutters came the farmers who introduced, amongst others, coffee, tea, bamboo, and mango plantations to the area. The remnants can still be seen today. The difficulty in shipping produce to markets, combined with a devastating cyclone in 1918, led to a general demise in farming until a road to the area was built in 1936.

The fate of the indigenous Aboriginal inhabitants was similarly afflicted. Initially they were used as a cheap labour source by the white farmers but as they later came to prefer working for Chinese employers, who would often pay in opium, they came to be resented by the white settlers. This led to the establishment of the Hull River Mission in 1914 (from where Mission Beach derives its name) which was destroyed by the 1918 cyclone. Those Aborigines who survived and who could be found were shipped off to Palm Island, near Townsville, ending a long association with the area. A history sadly not uncommon with other indigenous peoples of the world.