We have grown our herd considerably in the past few years, thanks to our generous neighbours who agreed to the agistment of our cattle on their pasture. We went from 11 Black Angus cattle in 2016 to 36 today. Up to 17 of our cows are now pregnant from a Murray Grey x Simmental x Angus bull named Coco.
However, as we no longer have access to additional pasture, we will have to reduce our herd numbers to 16 to be in tune with the regenerative grazing practices and not overgraze out land. This will be a slow process which will happen over the next 18 months. This means we will double our beef supply temporarily.
We will be butchering additional steers in the next 18 months. Until June 2024, the abundance of beef will be available, first to our existing CSA members then, the extra beef will also be offered in 1-month, 6-month or 12-month subscriptions to anyone in our delivery area.
We deliver every first and third Tuesday of the month (depending on your location) in Beaufort, Ballarat, Ballan, Melbourne, and some surrounding suburbs in a 10km radius from CBD. If you live further away, please check in with us before placing your order.
Please order ASAP and recommend us to your friends. Any additional beef ordered from now on will be temporary only.
The last couple of years revealed how delicate the food supply chain is but you don’t have to worry about your beef supply if you are a CSA member. We guarantee your beef on existing orders today and the renewal of those orders in the future.
We have enough cattle to supply you with 4 years of beef as we have 4 generations of cattle always grazing our land. We also keep an average of 2 months of frozen beef in case of abattoir closings or lockdowns. You also have a month supply at home.
]]>We have decided to end a beautiful chapter of our lives and gave all our hens up for adoption. Sunnybank Farm has purchased our equipment (egg washer and chicken trailer) and are currently raising a new flock on pasture.
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Delicious free range eggs
Hi lovely Abundance Farm supporters!
We have big news to share with all of you.
We will be offering free home delivery of Sunnybank Farm eggs twice a month from now on.
But also…
We have officially zero chickens on our land!
We have decided to end a beautiful chapter of our lives and gave all our hens up for adoption. The hens are retiring in suburban and country gardens where they are entertaining and feeding eggs to their human pets.
Sunnybank Farm has purchased our equipment (egg washer and chicken trailer) and are currently raising a new flock on pasture.
Sunnybank Farm is a great farm. Jasmine and Terry are excellent at pasture raising hens, keeping them healthy, happy, and safe.
They will be following most of the farming practices we used to do, with two exceptions:
1. The hens need safety netting around them to keep them safe, as they don’t have a guard dog
2. They are feeding them balanced feed pellets instead of upcycling food
From now on, we will be selling and delivering Sunnybank Farm eggs twice a month to your home in Beaufort, Ballarat and Melbourne for your convenience. The minimum order is 15 dozen eggs, so talk to a friend or neighbour and get a box of fresh pasture raised eggs to share.
We will be using the remainder of our Abundance Farm egg cartons, so they don’t go to waste.
Please place your order here:
$115 for 15 x 600g dozen eggs
$150 for 15 x 800g dozen eggs
We are looking for a person to join our team to help us manage, grow, and improve our farm.
If you have a passion for regenerative agriculture, are driven to improve our natural environment, if you are reliable, responsible, committed and ready to do hard meaningful work, please get in contact with us.
This position requires 5 days a week on average with seasonal variations and pays a base rate of $22/hour for the first 3 months of training. We are also offering quarterly bonuses of up to $2,500 once you demonstrate the above-mentioned traits and can understand, manage, and execute every aspect of the farm independently when needed, as well as committing to a longer term.
Abundance Farm is a mixed, biodiverse, regenerative, chemical free farm established in 2015 in Raglan, Victoria, on the foothills of Mount Cole.
Our mission is to advance the practice of regenerative agriculture, and the use of renewable energies and resources.
Kali and I (Alex) run the farm since 2015. We are currently caring for egg laying hens, black angus cattle, honeybees, fruit and native trees. We want to continue to grow and improve our carbon sequestration by planting trees and adding more organic matter to the soil through our operations.
Our 900 hens help us rescue 70 tons of food waste per year! We upcycle veggies, fruits, ravioli, tortillas, oils and brewer’s grain and turn it into eggs and compost. We add vitamins, minerals and probiotics such as apple cider vinegar to our chook’s feed, ensuring their health and nutrition as well as producing healthy nutritious eggs.
Our 32 black angus cows are rotationally grazing on 300 acres and help us cycle carbon and nutrients through our pasture as well as helping us cycle and process tree pruning from our agroforestry system to increase the soil organic matter.
We sell our produce through CSA memberships, directly from the farm to our farm members, and to organic grocers in Ballarat and Melbourne.
We have planted 4,000 trees so far and want to continue doing so until we have a healthy agroforestry system of forest alleyways with 20,000 trees.
Our current projects include breeding and brooding cows and chickens, planting and growing trees and other perennials, but also building a post and beam timbercrete house and a food processing facility powered by a 15kw solar system.
We are looking for a Farm Operations Manager who would be mainly in charge of the laying hen part of our regenerative farming adventure here at Abundance Farm in Raglan, Victoria.
We offer a great opportunity to fulfill your desire to work in a beautiful environment following regenerative farming practices.
We need someone motivated, with farming experience, showing their ability to work independently and in a team.
Check out our job description for more information. If you’re interested, send your CV and cover letter to:
alex@abundancefarm.com.au
kali@abundancefarm.com.au
We can’t deny the reality of climate change anymore. Proof is everywhere around us: weeks of bush fires in Tasmania ended up by snow in February, massive floods in Queensland inducing the death of 500,000 heads of cattle and undetermined number of wildlife, new heat records beaten almost every year, ice melting in the North Pole, ocean levels rising, pollinator insects going extinct, biodiversity disappearing… It is happening fast and it is accelerating. The only chance we have to reverse this as fast as possible is to heal our land through regenerative agriculture.
It is urgent to stop producing food like an industry and turn towards regenerative practices (permaculture, biodynamics, agroecology, holistic management). We need to stop producing in mass and go local with small-scale ethical farming practices that benefit both the environment and the community.
Diversity in the pasture attracts different pollinators
Monoculture is a no through road. It first contributes massively to deforestation around the world, which takes the planet’s lungs away from us and therefore disarm us from a precious tool to fight against atmospheric pollution. Then, it attracts pests and weeds that need to be removed by insecticides and herbicides. The use of big machinery compacts the soil that end up being ploughed to get oxygen back in, but doing so kills the remaining biology that hasn’t been killed yet by the chemicals. This releases additional carbon from the soil. Salinity of soils is increased with flooding irrigation practices which ultimately decreases the production and kills the land.
The myth that the big agroindustry (monoculture) is the only way to feed the world is completely false. Many examples of chemical free small- scale diversified farms are showing that we can produce food ethically and restore damaged land at the same time:
- A 4 years study1 from INRA (National Institute for Agricultural Research in France) shows that permaculture is profitable, producing intensively on a small surface and without the use of nasty chemicals or big machinery
- In RetroSurburbia2, case studies show how people managed successfully to retrofit their house, grow food in their garden and change their habits, reducing their impact on their environment
Promoting biodiversity is the key to successful chemical free farming practices. Alternating species of plants and trees create ecosystems that can fight diseases and pests by themselves. Some plants will attract beneficial insects and predators (birds, lizards, frogs) that feed on pests while others will release smells that confuses pests or compounds from their roots that repel nasty underground microbiology. Avoiding compaction of the land and adding biology and biomass create balance and habitat for billions of microorganisms. It is vital that we create habitat for insects and birds as many of them are the pollinators we need to grow food.
Building resilience by creating a diverse food system which doesn't need the use of nasty chemicals
The meat industry is a disgusting system that doesn’t consider the animal welfare and uses the animals as products and not beings. Generally, their life conditions are terrible: they live packed in sheds, or worst, in cages, without seeing sunlight and/or pasture their whole life; they’re fed with processed food only and are given antibiotics to grow faster; they are packed in big trucks that transport them to their inhumane death. All this for a very bad quality meat that we find served in plastic in the supermarkets.
It is necessary to radically change these horrible practices and choose to farm with understanding and respect for the environment and the beings living in it. It is urgent to reconnect with Nature and comprehend the cycles of life again.
Like described in the book Farming Democracy3, ethical farming practices exist and are the solution to conscious omnivores. Animals can be well treated and fed on pasture when grazing them on a quick rotational basis. This allows a necessary resting period for the pasture that provides good pasture all year round.
Happy pasture fed cow at Abundance Farm
We have to stop burning the carbon and release it into our atmosphere. We can’t talk about sustainability anymore. We’ve passed that point. We need to go beyond and regenerate! The only way to do so is to put back the carbon in the ground as fast as we can.
Sequestering carbon can be done through rotational grazing. When herbivores are managed in a biodiverse rotational grazing system, they help us to cycle the carbon and the nitrogen back into the soil that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere through the oxidation of the grasses. The top soil quickly builds up and is in constant improvement. This farming system reproduces what would occur naturally in the wild with big predators pushing herbivores to graze in different places, avoiding overgrazing and desertification.
Happy cows and chooks in a diverse regenerative agriculture system
(Photo by Marianne Khol)
Planting trees is the most effective way to sequester carbon and create a better future. Trees are essential to our survival as they sequester carbon and release oxygen into the atmosphere. When they are integrated into a diverse farming system like agroforestry, they help us fight erosion, create wildlife habitat and increase biomass as well as food, fodder and timber production. Trees also retain water in their roots and their trunk and act as water reserve. This kind of farm gives us resilience against drought and climate change. Well managed, it also provides what we need to live in harmony with our environment, as custodians of the Earth and not just consumers.
Alex and Kali after planting a native forest in 2016
CSA stands for Community Supportive Agriculture. It is a collaborating system between the farmers and their community. Farmers share the risks and the rewards of their yield by offering memberships. The idea is to minimize the impact of fertility problems and variations in sizes of carcass throughout the year (when it is about meat production) or climate issues (when it is an orchard or a market garden). It also guarantees a great quality of produce to the members for a fair price. All parts of the animals are used, avoiding waste, and the members get to know and cook cuts they’ve probably never heard before. It’s the same with fruits and veggies: members get seasonal produce, sometimes discover heirloom varieties they didn’t know existed, and have to preserve some of it when it comes in abundance for the times it’s not in season anymore. This sharing system provides to the members a direct connection to the farm and a better understanding of the food production.
CSA has been created in Japan in the 1970’s and follow the 10 principles of Teikei4. Basically, as a CSA member you choose to support regenerative farming practices and animal welfare and we, farmers, are directly accountable to our consumers. CSA allows the reduction of our carbon footprint by sequestering carbon with diversified farming systems as well as delivering farm produce locally. CSA provides with very appreciated regular income to growers, increasing their quality of life, earning a living from their work. CSA helps to give back food sovereignty to farmers and consumers instead of agrobusiness corporations. Finally, CSA encourages and supports emergent farmers like us.
Alex in the paddock with a day old calf born in December 2018
It is vital to change our food habits and to know where our food comes from. The only way to stop the terrible practices of the big agroindustry is to stop buying their horrible products. We vote with our wallets. Meet your farmers at the farmers markets for example, and talk to them. Become a member of a CSA. Encourage small local businesses and buy from your local grocer, wholefoods collective or a delivery business that get their produce from local farmers. Eat local and of season. Eat better meat, less.
We are very excited to announce that we’re finally launching our CSA at Abundance Farm! It has been in our plans since we started our ambitious project but it took us time to develop it. We needed this time to learn the strings of our work: taking care of our animals and run our business. Now we’re ready to start a new adventure and to share it with you.
Becoming a CSA member at Abundance Farm means that you will be delivered our farm produce monthly, directly to your home. You will also receive prior notice and discounts for any limited farm produce and special events or workshops organised at the farm. You will be invited once a year to our annual ‘members only farm day’ where you’ll get the opportunity to give us feedback, meet our feathery and furry friends, visit the farm and share a feast together.
Our CSA is open to a very limited number of households located in Victoria (Beaufort, Ballarat, Ballan, Castlemaine, Kyneton, Daylesford, Woodend and Melbourne).
At the moment we propose two different kinds of shares based on our present production and the size of your household:
- Small Abundance Share: 4kg of beef in average + 2 dozen eggs every month for a household of 2 to 3 persons
- Large Abundance Share: 8kg of beef in average + 4 dozen eggs every month for a household of 4 and more persons (or shared between two households)
In the future, we’ll have more variety of products as we’ll extend our production to fruits and veggies which means that the content of the shares will evolve with time. That is the beauty of CSA. You get what your farmer produces.
If you’re interested in becoming a member of our CSA, you can get more information on our website.
1 If you are interested to read the complete study in French, you can download it here.
2 Retrosuburbia: the downshifter’s guide to a resilient future, David Holmgren, Melliodora Publications
3 Farming Democracy: Radically Transforming the Food System from the Ground Up, Paula Fernandez Arias, Tammi Jonas & Katarina Munksgaard, Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance
4 You can get more information about the principles of Teikei on our website
5 Quote from Gandhi
]]>Apple orchards have been planted by humankind for millennia. We’ve created thousands of varieties to adapt this delicious fruit for cooking, eating fresh, juicing, drying or even making cider, vinegar etc. We have adapted our apple varieties and planted apple orchards in most of the world in different climates zones.
Unfortunately, the standardisation of food production is threatening this diversity. We’ve lost a lot of varieties of fruit trees (not just apples) in the last 50 years. Apple varieties have been favoured due to their shape, colour or shelf life and other traits, such as flavour and cooking versatility, have been lost. We can all encourage heritage fruit varieties by sourcing a local supply of diverse, delicious food and planting more fruit trees in our backyards.
Some old varieties are endangered and might disappear for good unless we change our habits. The commodification of apples has reduced the number of varieties in shops around the world. The market has dictated what kind of trees the farmers grow in his apple orchard and has contributed greatly to the disappearance of many varieties in the last decades.
First baby apples in the Abundance Farm apple orchard
(Photo by Laure Giraud)
Most people don’t know more than two or three varieties of apples. Everybody knows the existence of the very successful Gala or Granny Smith. But what about the Jonathan, Belle de Boskoop, Sturmer Pippin or Reinette du Canada? What will be left for the next generations if we stop cultivating these old varieties? If we stop eating them? These apples don’t have only pretty names, they are also delicious, beautifully different in shape, colour and taste and can be used for different purposes.
NB: Heritage varieties are adapted to live in a wide range of climates and altitudes.
Along the centuries, we mastered the art of grafting, which allow us to control the size of the trees as well as making them resistant to common pests and diseases. Diversity is the key to maintain a beautiful ecosystem in place and create a natural food system that doesn’t include the use of nasty chemicals. That’s why it is good to plant companion plants next to the apple trees like nasturtium that will repel the codling moth, marigold that repel root knot nematodes, comfrey that will bring up minerals and make them available for the trees, yarrow that attracts the predator wasps, clover that is fixing nitrogen, and the list goes on.
Apple ready to be picked
With a thoughtful planning, there are many advantages in having different kinds of trees in your apple orchard. You can extend your apple season for up to 5 months by having early, mid and late season varieties. You can also diversify your apple uses and dry, cook, make juice, cider or vinegar as some varieties are better than others for such things. The Akane, for example, is great eaten fresh or dried. The King of the Pippins is a delicious cooking apple from the 18th century that can also be used to make cider.
Finally, I’d say that creating a living library of trees is also a great gift for the next generations and another very good reason for planting these trees, propagating them within our communities and sharing them as much as we can.
We’re proud to have planted an apple orchard with 15 different kinds of trees last year: Akane, Belle de Boskoop, Egremont Russet, Fuji, Gala, Golden Delicious, Jonathan, King of the Pippins, Mutsu, Red Delicious, Reinette du Canada, Spartan, Stewart’s Seedling, Sturmer Pippin, Summer Red. This is only the beginning as we want to extend the apple orchard throughout the farm and have more varieties of fruit trees in the future.
Our geese and ducks are living in the apple orchard, maintaining and fertilising it
(Photo by Kali)
We’ve planted our trees behind swales on contour which are catching rain water. This way, we slow down the water, avoid erosion and provide water for our apple trees. Our ducks and geese live in the orchard and help us maintain and fertilise it. They have access to water baths from which we use the water to fertilise and water the trees. This type of agroforestry is a mix of duckponics and an alley cropping orchard. Takao Furuno describes in his book The Power of Duck how ducks are used to fertilise and protect rice fields from pests. Alley cropping is a contour orchard with pasture in between each row that can also be a crop or an access.
Regenerative agriculture can increase our food production and heal the environment. If you want to know more about our farm or have any questions, reach out on our Facebook page.
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Today is special! We're finally starting our crowd sourcing campaign to raise funds for our regenerative farming project.
Since we started Abundance Farm, three and a half years ago, we've been investing all our hearts, sweat and money into the farm, reinvesting everything back into this project. We are hard workers and we're ambitious. We want to make a difference and heal this little part of the planet we're living on. We want to make it thrive and we know we are on the right track.
We can achieve our goals on our own but with your help, we could accelerate the process and make this project resilient way faster.
You can contribute to our project with a donation and by sharing this link with your family and friends: https://www.gofundme.com/abundancefarm
Thank you very much for your support!
]]>The Ballarat Wholefoods Collective is a ethical community shop run by a group of volunteers that have been one of our early project's supporters by selling our eggs every week.
It is one of these great initiatives that connect people to their food, where it comes from and their producers.
This is a place where you bring your own containers to buy in bulk and contribute to reduce plastic waste, where the products are almost all coming from a local farmer or company, and where you can do workshops like learning how to make your own sourdough bread.
Wendy and the other volunteers participating in this ethical adventure are local heroes because they do the right thing for the consumers, the producers and the environment.
If you live in Ballarat or surroundings and want to support local and sustainable produce, become a member of this collective.
You can follow them on Facebook, Instagram or visit their website.
This week Costa went to pay them a visit.
We spent the last two days at Jonai Farms cutting our first steer and making sausages. Tammi has been absolutely amazing! She and her crew spent the first day in the boning room with us cutting our very first beef carcass. We're so grateful she could spare so much time out of her already busy farming life and spend the whole day guiding us and patiently teaching us how to proceed. It is a big job and it would have been very difficult to do it without her expertise and her great butchering skills.
The second day was dedicated to sausage making. Alex had a great recipe in mind: adding white sage and stout to our beef sausages! Alex and I are no experts and, on our own, it took us the whole day to make these sausages. It was totally worth it though, they are absolutely delicious!
These yummy beef sausages will be in the Abundance Farm Beef Boxes along with an assortment of seasonal cuts of our delicious pasture range free range beef. You can purchase them in two sizes:White sage & stout beef sausages
(Photo by Kali)
We’re very excited and happy to introduce Abundance Farm pasture raised free range beef.
We have a small herd of black Angus cattle that graze our land on a quick rotation basis to guarantee access to good pasture all year round. We also feed them with a natural mineral mix that we make ourselves to keep them healthy and ensure a very good quality and nutritional meat.
Indeed, our cows are a complete part of our regenerative agriculture project as they provide manure, participate into diversifying the pasture and improving the soil.
We decided to sell our beef in farm boxes so you can get the beef directly from the farm to your house and in an assortment of different cuts so everything from the animal is used. By purchasing an Abundance Farm Beef Box, you help us continue our regenerative agriculture project.
The Abundance Farm Beef Box consists in 5kg of beef and a dozen eggs for $150 or 10kg of beef and 2 dozen eggs for $290. When you buy the 10kg beef box, we give you a 2017 Shiraz bottle for free, made from grapes we picked ourselves.
We deliver for free in some areas of Beaufort, Ballarat, Ballan, Daylesford, Castlemaine, Kyneton, Woodend, and Melbourne. We’ll ask you to prepare an esky full of ice out of your house if you’re not there the day we deliver.
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We would like to give a big thank you to CERES Fair Food which has been a key player in the success of our farm.
It is their mission to support local farmers at fair prices and they have done just that when buying our pasture raised free range eggs. They also have been providing our hens all the unusable greens, fruits and veggies so that they can produce the best quality eggs and nothing goes to waste.
When unusable veggies from CERES Fair Food become food for our chooks
(Photos by Kali)
Did you know that 100% of their profits go towards CERES Education ?
They also offset all the carbon from their delivery fleet by contributing to the lao cook-stove project.
Their warehouse has an 80kw solar array producing more solar power than they use making them a carbon negative enterprise.
CERES is an amazing organization. You can support them and us by purchasing our eggs and other ethical regenerative farm produce at @ceresfairfood and @ceresmarketandgrocery .
Learn more about CERES here:
https://www.ceresfairfood.org.au/
https://ceres.org.au/education/
https://ceres.org.au/social-enterprises/grocery/