Seeing consumers speaking with their feet when seeking healthy food is heartening. The desire to understand the provenance of their food is informing their shopping choices. Without this, there is no incentive for farmers to do things differently, and they will keep producing cheap food to the detriment of the landscape. This demand is the crux of creating change in farming practices. If customers are willing to pay more for quality, it enables smaller landholders to produce honest, nutritious food.
At Forage Farms, we achieve profitability by thinking beyond the traditional one-to-two enterprise farming model. The pigs and chickens don't rely on grass from the paddocks, as they are fed an external feed source. They act as a tool to fertilise and improve the paddocks for our cattle and, at the same time, are a product to sell. They are the perfect starter revenue stream when establishing a natural sequence farm.
Creating a community that is committed to change is what gets us out of bed every day. How we farm allows us to use our resources productively, benefiting the landscape, animals, and customers.
The beauty of regenerative farming is that you can produce food on a small scale and profit from it. It's about changing the way you think about farming. Through Tarwyn Park Training, we teach farmers how to do this. Forage Farms showcases a successful and productive regenerative farm, and we delight in sharing it with a growing community.
Curiosity about our methods is expanding beyond farmers to people working on erosion management and rehabilitation in the mining and natural capital space. Earthmoving companies are even coming to us to understand more about contours. They learn why and how to build them to increase their skill set and product offerings. This is encouraging evidence of progress.
With growing curiosity about food provenance and the need to care for the landscape and animals to produce better-quality food, more farmers are considering doing it this way. If you have a small land holding, it is possible and worth exploring.
