Our Practices
What we do, and what we don't.
The Standard
It's easier to say what we don't use.
No vaccines. No corn, no soy, no canola. No synthetic inputs on the land, and nothing in the barn we wouldn't want in the milk.
Not because it's fashionable — because we eat this food every day and feed it to our children. Clean feed, open pasture, traditional methods, and time. That's the whole recipe.
What We Don't Do
This half is the shorter list, and it is the one most people came to read.
- No corn, no soy, no canola in any feed, for any animal on this place.
- No synthetic inputs. Ever. No synthetic fertiliser, herbicide or pesticide — not on the pasture, not on the hayfield, and not on the ground the grain we buy in was grown on. That last one is the part most people don't ask about.
- No routine vaccines and no routine antibiotics. An animal that is genuinely sick gets treated by a vet, and we say so.
- No growth promotants or hormone implants.
- No confinement. Every animal here is outside on grass in the growing season, with shelter it can choose.
- Nothing in the barn we wouldn't want in the milk. Equipment is sanitised with hypochlorous acid — generated from salt, water and electricity, breaks back down to salt water, leaves no residue.
What We Do
The longer half, and the one that takes the actual work.
- Rotational grazing. Stock move on before they take a paddock down, and the ground gets its rest. Cattle and sheep graze differently, and pasture that carries both is healthier than pasture that carries either alone.
- Build soil, year over year. We measure success by one question: is there more life here than when we started?
- Keep the land complicated. A quarter section of mixed pasture, hayfield and forest backing onto crown land — grassland birds, pollinators, native plants. Ecological richness only comes from land nobody has simplified.
- Feed clean, and be difficult about it. Hay from our own fields and from local growers we have chosen carefully. The hogs' oats, barley and pea mix is organically and biodynamically grown — organically meaning what it says, no synthetic inputs on that ground either. Biodynamic is a method, not a label, and neither is a substitute for asking: what compost went on, what manure, from which animals, and how clean. Certification is not the bar we use, and plenty of grain that carries a label would not clear ours. A grower who can't answer those questions doesn't feed our animals. The hogs also get the whey left from our own cheesemaking.
- Traditional methods, and time. Slower-growing animals, food made the way it was made before it was made quickly.
- Say what is true. Everything here is organically raised. We are not certified organic, and we don't want anyone assuming otherwise — certification is a paperwork regime, not a practice, and we have chosen to spend the money on the farm instead. What that costs you is the ability to take our word for it, which is why we would rather you came and looked.
Where That Isn't The Whole Story
A page like this is worth nothing if it only lists the easy parts, so here is the place our own standard and the world's rules do not line up.
Meat we sell publicly has to be processed at an inspected abattoir. If you ask for bacon or ham, the curing is done there, to the butcher's recipes rather than ours, and the cure contains nitrites. Commercially cured pork in this country is nitrite-cured. That is a synthetic input, on a page that otherwise says we don't use any — and we would rather write that sentence down than let you find it out later.
It is a condition of selling to the public, not a preference of ours, and it is entirely optional: anything you would rather have plain, we leave plain. Nothing else we produce is cured, and nothing on the private side of the farm goes near it.
We're not perfect — the bar is high and we don't always hit it. But we're always working to get closer. The way an animal lives is not separate from the food it provides.