About us

Start with an egg

Everyone knows what an egg is. It’s the most ordinary thing in the fridge.

Ours come from hens that live outside. They follow the sheep around the farm in a coop on wheels, scratching through the manure, picking out bugs and pulling at green shoots to go with their feed. It suits them, and it suits the paddock: the manure gets spread about and the ground gets a long rest before anything comes back.

We’ve got a batch of Quamby chicks coming on at the moment. They’re an older breed, and the plan is to breed from them and move them into the caravan in time.

An egg is an ordinary sort of miracle: grass, bugs, grain and sunshine, turned into breakfast. Which brings us to the part that took us a while to see.

It all starts with sunlight

That egg started as sunlight. So did every bit of meat on our table.

Grass and trees catch the sun and turn it into leaves and roots. Those roots leak sugars into the soil, feeding a whole underground world of fungi, bacteria and worms, and that soil life feeds the plants back. Animals eat the plants, drop manure, and the cycle turns again, all the way to our plates.

Bare dirt catches no sunlight at all. So most of what we do comes back to one job: keep as much ground green and growing as we can, for as much of the year as we can. That means moving the animals on before they eat a paddock bare, giving it time to regrow, and helping the rain soak into our sandy soil instead of running off.

It’s heading in the right direction. The soil is showing early signs of improving, including holding more carbon. It’s far too early for a victory lap, though.

Animals with jobs

Our animals aren’t just here to be fed. Each of them does real work on the land.

The sheep graze a strip of paddock and move on, so the grass gets a rest. The pigs root up rough ground. The goats take on the scrubby stuff the sheep won’t touch. They get to do what they’re built to do, outside, on grass, in the sun. That’s a better life for them and better for the land.

Some of our animals become food, and we don’t pretend otherwise. While they’re with us they get good feed, clean water, shade, shelter, company, and care when they’re sick. Because we choose their last day, we take responsibility for making it as quick and calm as we can. We call it a good life and one bad day.

What we don't spray

Most of us assume a weed spray kills the weed and that’s the end of it. We did too.

It isn’t quite that simple. A weed killer like glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, works because the plant soaks it up through its leaves and carries it all the way down to the roots. It gets used on footpaths, in backyards, across paddocks, and on some crops close to harvest. Some other weed killers last even longer: they can survive in hay, pass right through an animal, and still stop plants growing where the manure lands.

We think we learned that one the hard way. We spread mushroom compost on part of our best paddock, and we suspect it carried one of those long-lasting weed killers, because plants in that patch haven’t done well since. We’re still working on putting it right.

Regulators say the traces that end up in food are safe at the levels they allow. Some scientists aren’t so sure, and there’s still real argument about what these chemicals do to the life in the soil. On a farm where everything depends on that soil life, and the food ends up on our own table, we’d rather not find out the hard way.

So we don’t use synthetic weed killers or pesticides, and we don’t dose our animals out of habit. If an animal is sick, we treat it.

And the weeds? Mostly they’re telling us something: that the soil is short of something, or has been knocked about. Fix the soil and they tend to back off on their own.

We’re not here to lecture anyone. Plenty of good farmers use these tools because they work and the numbers demand it. We just want to show another way can work too, and share what we learn along the way.