Helping people understand and make the most of their food, while also helping other small farmers do the same. Do you want to know what motivated us to get into farming when the whole world seems to be turning against farmers? To explain, we need to go back a few decades. Although we spent many years living in cities and even overseas, we all grew up in farming communities both here in Australia,
and in New Zealand and remember fondly the bountiful foods we enjoyed picking straight from an orchard, or along the side of the road. Our parents bought high quality produce direct from local farmers, green grocers and butchers, or grew it in a veggie patch in the back yard. We ate seasonally, we ate fresh and we were healthy as a result. In the decades since then, our world changed as technology revolutionised life as we knew it. But a downside of our technological advancement is that society has grown increasingly detached from the food that we eat. We no longer eat seasonally or locally but increasingly eat foods grown, raised and subsequently shipped all over the world. If we really stopped and thought about the origins of our family meal, we may be shocked to discover just how many food miles our meal has racked up! This longing for the past has always simmered beneath the surface, and has even dictated what foods we choose to purchase when shopping or eating out, choosing local over imported whenever possible. But it really wasn't until the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020, and the decimation of our Global Food Supply that we decided to really look at how we eat and where we source our food from. And with that came a fateful decision to raise or source as much of it ourselves as we could. Our goal was self-sufficiency, which wasn’t easy to achieve when we lived in the middle of suburbia. So, along with half of Australia, we started with chickens and a veggie patch in our backyard. They say chickens are the gateway drug to farming, and it wasn’t long before we were eying off bigger animals. Thankfully, my parents had 86 acres up at Little Swanport. It wasn’t exactly farm land – in fact, it hadn’t ever been farmed – but we figured we could use it to see if we actually liked farming enough to return to it full time. Our next step was figuring out what we wanted to farm, and probably more importantly, how we wanted to farm. We weren’t interested in doing what everyone else was doing and preferred marching to the beat of our own drum. Nor did we want to raise our animals as commercial commodities. We wanted healthy, happy, free-range animals that lived great lives until the very end. We also wanted to close the gap between farmer and consumer. Over the next few months, we watched hundreds of hours of YouTube videos on farming, and read everything we could get our hands on. But, in the end, it was the land that made the important decisions for us. Our first challenge was restoring the land, which led us to pursuing regenerative farming practices. We also knew the land was too poor for commercial breeds of cattle, so we needed something hardier that could forage the native grasses and bushes, and handle the rocky landscape. And in researching regenerative farming, we discovered that pigs were amazing at digging up rocks and turning the soil. Given all these challenges, it made sense to choose heritage breeds. Not only are they better suited to our land and farming style, they also taste better. So in November 2020, we bought our first pig – Nugget, a purebred Saddleback sow. And in January 2021, our first cows arrived on the property – 3 Belted Galloway heifers including one whose broken belt looked just like the map of Tasmania (so naturally, we named her Tassie). With little grass on the ground, we had to seek out alternative food sources for our livestock. We bought in hay, rolling it out to add vital carbon into the soil and introduce pasture seed that would eventually grow into healthy, green grass for our animals. That kept our cows reasonably happy, but we found that our pigs had insatiable appetites. In short, they were little pigs who constantly wanted to eat. Sure, we could have bought livestock feed for them. But we knew there had to be a better way. Knowing that around 50% of all food grown ends up in landfill, we wanted to figure out how we could help reduce that while solving our feed problem. We made some calls to other local businesses and discovered they were paying to dispose of their food waste at the tip. We offered to collect it for them and feed it to the animals, which was a win-win solution for us all - and perhaps even more importantly, a win for the environment. Each week, we collect grain mash from a local distillery, liquid whey from a local cheesemaker, vegetable scraps from a commercial kitchen, and leftover bread from a local bakery chain - that's nearly 10,000kgs of food waste each week or nearly 500,000kgs a year that doesn't end up in landfill from just one small farm! Long story short, we have been farming for around 18 months now, and absolutely love it! We're keen to make this our new way of life. Our herd has now grown. We have over 70 cows, 30 bacon seeds growing in our front paddock, and a flock of Hampshire and Black Faced Suffolk sheep that our daughter raises. We will soon start growing heirloom fruits and vegetables, which we will turn into delicious preserves and sauces. We have also started selling our meat direct to the public. Oh yeah, and earlier this year, we took the bull by the horns, sold our suburban home and bought a small farm in Forcett, giving us even more land to rotate our livestock through. We also have big plans for the future that includes a farmgate shop, an information centre, and farm tours - which will all help us close that gap between farmgate and dinner plate. If you would like to drop by the farm, and see how we are restoring the land, and finding sustainable ways to feed our livestock, give us a call on 0428 177 638 or send us an email to [email protected]
