Our communities future health is at the core of our farming practice at Gowrie Farm. Our aim is to produce the most nutrient dense local milk source for you and your family. We do this by farming differently – that means no synthetic fertilizers, no ‘cides’ like herbicides, fungicides and pesticides that degrade our soil biology and most importantly our cows celebrate each day as they enter fresh diverse pasture. As you know, if we only ate bread as our food we wouldn’t be able to provide the nutrition our bodies need to function – we believe our cows need the same. You will find our cows on any given day eating a mix of grasses like rye, oats and prairie as well as herbs; chicory and plantain, plants from the legume family; red and white clovers, lucerne and vetch, flowers such as sunflowers and sun hemp, as well as those important leafy brassicas. Our farming practice also encourages indigenous plants to flourish and you’ll find kangaroo grass, spear grass and wallaby grass throughout the paddocks.
Some people ask, how do you fertilise your paddocks. In the past we spread chicken manure and other compost products onto the paddock – however we realized our cows are our best composters – when we increase the stocking density we get to fertilise paddocks evenly and also provide the land a longer time to rest between grazing’s, allowing for the recovery of indigenous and deep tap rooted herbs to flourish. This system of farming has spurred on the life under the soil and worms and dung beetles can process our cow pattys for most of the year back into the soil within 48 hours! This active biology means the Co2 from decomposing manure on the surface is greatly reduced and instead of oxidizing on the surface the microbes break down the carbon and nutrients in the manures underneath the ground making them available again to the array of plant roots below the ground.
This farming system means most of our work is not done on a tractor, or on heavy equipment – we are gentle on the earth and move our cows on foot twice daily. We use e-bikes powered by solar from the farm to move around and the excess solar generated to power the dairy.
What we want is a healthy soil microbiome, producing a diversity of plants feeding the cows microbiome which in turn produces nutrient dense food for our gut microbiome – only when we get this right can we address the abundant goodness that marked our food system of years ago and start to restore true health to our bodies.