This is the honest version. Not the version we'd like to be true one day — what we actually do on this farm, right now, animal by animal. If something here changes, we'll change the page.
What we do
- Every animal is born and raised on our family's farms on the Granite Belt, about 600 acres between them.
- Beef is grass-fed and grass-finished. Pasture, and hay and molasses through winter.
- Pigs are born in the paddock and live outside all year, on certified organic feed and organic apple pulp.
- Stock get moved and the country gets rested. Nothing synthetic goes on the paddocks.
- We take the animals to the abattoir ourselves, a small load at a time, and hand the meat to you frozen.
What we don't do
- No grain to the cattle, no feedlot, ever.
- No hormones. No vaccines. No routine drenching or chemical treatments.
- No teeth clipping, tail docking or castration of pigs. No farrowing crates, no concrete.
- No synthetic fertiliser.
- No pretending. If an animal ever needs treating, it gets treated — and it's sold on the regular market, never to you. And we are not certified organic; some of what we feed is, some isn't, and it's all listed below.
Cattle, sheep and goats
What they eat. Pasture, first and mostly. Through the Granite Belt winter, when the paddocks stop growing, we buy in spray-free hay and grass — lucerne and Rhodes grass — from farmers we know. We also feed molasses from a tank, with a mineral and nutrient mix, to get good-quality feed into them when it's cold. The molasses is ordinary molasses, not organic. The mineral mix is an organic-allowable input, not a certified one. And three bins a month of organic apple pulp from the juice factory go to the cattle and goats.
How they're grazed. The cattle, sheep and goats mostly run together, because not all of our paddocks are sheep- and goat-proof. They're moved from paddock to paddock as they need it, and the country behind them gets a rest, which also helps break parasite cycles without a drench. The pasture keeps coming back, and the animals do well on it.
Pigs
What they eat. Soft Ag certified organic grower feed, a bin of organic apple pulp a month, waste fruit and veg from Stanthorpe farms when it's going, and whatever they find in the paddock — cocksfoot, rye grass, and the bugs they root up when they want protein. Certified organic grain costs about twice what regular grain does. That's why most pork sold as "free range" in organic shops isn't organically fed. Ours is both, and it's the main reason the pork tastes the way it does.
How they live. Born in the paddock, not a stall. Old breeds that do well outside and put down proper fat, which is why our bacon tastes like bacon. No teeth clipping, no tail docking, no castration, no concrete. The pigs get big paddocks and there aren't many of them, so a mob might stay in one paddock for up to a month before we shift the housing and move them on. They build nests out of dead grass and dig for bugs, which roughs up the ground a bit and does the pasture good.
Animal health
We don't vaccinate and we don't drench on a schedule. We try to stay ahead of problems by feeding well, keeping stock moving and paying attention. That works most of the time.
When it doesn't — when an animal is sick or carrying a worm burden that needs a drench — we treat it. We think that's the right thing to do by the animal. That animal is then sold through the regular market and is never part of what we sell to you. It's the compromise we've settled on, and we'd rather tell you about it than pretend it never happens.
The soil
Granite Belt soil isn't rich river flat. It's thin, old and fragile, and it remembers what you do to it. About ten years ago, before we went this way, some of these paddocks got superphosphate, a plough and a heavy oat crop. It pulled the life out of them, and a few are still recovering. That's the lesson everything else here comes from.
Now nothing synthetic goes on. What does: certified organic chicken manure carted up from a farm down near Casino, dolomite, and natural rock minerals. Not as often as we'd like, because good inputs are dear and carting them is dearer. The cheap local option is composted conventional chook litter, which the rules allow and most growers around here use. We haven't been comfortable with what commercial chooks get fed, so we've stayed off it. We might be wrong about that; we're still weighing it up.
Processing
We take our own animals to the abattoir at Yangan, a small load at a time. Our butcher at Tenterfield cuts, packs and cryovacs every order. It's frozen from there until it's in your hands at the pickup point.
What we're working on
- A cheap, clean source of soil nutrients we're happy to put our name to — legumes in the pasture, our own compost, maybe something cleverer.
- Finding an organic molasses supply that doesn't cost the earth.
- Moving the pigs more often.
Questions about any of it? Ask. We'll give you a straight answer.
