The Back Story
It's hard to know where it started exactly. Clayton and I both grew up amongst farm life, him in Mudgee, myself in Queensland.
As a teenager, Clayton was told all the common things, that he shouldn't be a "farmer" that "there's no money in farming" and that he should "work all your life and when you retire you might be able to buy a little place then to potter around on until you die".
So maybe you could argue it was good advice but what if farming is all you want to do? Suffice to say, these comments were just the motivation he needed to follow his dreams. And it piqued his interest to look into the techniques of farming, why it didn't work for many and how to fix it.
We had the opportunity to move onto this property in the Spring of 2017. Most of the grazing country was overgrazed, there were plough pans in cultivation paddocks and erosion underway. At that stage, we just had a mob of Australian White sheep here and the fences did little to contain them in large paddocks, let alone on the property! A large part of the property was agisted out with cattle. It was quite dry and by 2018, a drought had really taken hold. We did what everyone said to do, we bought a b double load of hay and a tipper load of cotton seed and started feeding the sheep and a small herd of cattle we'd bought.
Over many years he'd been researching and implementing holistic planned grazing practices and trying to farm more with nature, not against her. He now started building more fences, controlling stock movements more carefully, and amazingly we were able to stop feeding even in the grip of the drought. We never did feed out all that hay and cotton seed, and seasons and management have meant we have not needed to feed stock again.
2019 saw a health journey with him and with a young family now started there was even greater scrutiny on what we were eating and how our food was produced. We stopped all chemical fertilisers amongst other things and started using natural treatments for stock. We understood just how deeply connected was the health of landscapes, animals and humans.
It was about then that Clayton read Gabe Brown's book "Dirt To Soil". It was a light bulb moment, and he's now read it about 10 times.
We'd always had laying hens, mostly in more scale than we could consume ourselves. Clayton had already built our own "chicken tractor" out of an old box trailer. So after completing a holistic management course in 2020 we took the leap to increase our flock to increase their impact across a wider area of the farm.
And so began Coolah Valley Pastured Eggs!
