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, but because it's right.
What We Don't Do
- No corn, soy or canola in any feed, for any animal here.
- No synthetic fertiliser, herbicide or pesticide. Not on our pasture, not on our hayfield, and not on the ground the grain we buy was grown on.
- No vaccines or routine antibiotics. An animal that is genuinely sick gets a vet, and we tell you.
- No growth promotants or hormone implants.
- No confinement. Every animal 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 — made here from salt, water and electricity, which breaks back down to salt water and leaves no residue.
What We Do
- Rotational grazing. We move the animals around, and the ground gets its rest.
- Cattle and sheep on the same ground. They graze differently, and pasture that carries both is healthier than pasture that carries either alone.
- Mixed land, kept mixed. A quarter section of pasture, hayfield and forest backing onto crown land, with the grassland birds, pollinators and native plants that come with it.
- Slower-growing animals, and food made the old way because it comes out better.
- Whey from our own cheesemaking goes to the hogs.
- Soil measured year over year. More life in it than last year, or we are doing something wrong.
Feed
Hay from our own fields and from local growers we have chosen carefully. The hogs and dairy cows get oats, barley and pea mix, organically grown in the sense the word is supposed to carry: no synthetic inputs, ever — not on our ground, and not on the ground that grain came off.
Organic as the low bar, we won't accept synthetic inputs in contact with our feed as you are what you eat. The high bar we've reached is biodynamic feed - grown in tune with nature's own cycles.
None of it is certified. Certification is not the bar we use, because what we ask a grower is narrower: what compost went on, what manure, from which animals, and how were they raised. Plenty of grain that carries a label would not meet our standards.
Not certified organic
Everything here is organically raised, and we are not certified organic — we would rather nobody assumed otherwise. Certification is a paperwork regime, not a practice, and we have spent the money on the farm instead.
Where That Isn't The Whole Story
Meat we sell publicly has to be processed at an inspected abattoir. If you order bacon or ham, the curing happens 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 use none, and we would rather write it down than have you find it out later.
It is a condition of selling to the public, not a preference of ours, and it is optional: anything you would rather have plain, we leave plain. Nothing else we produce is cured.