When I was a kid, our local town of Millaa Millaa was a thriving community. It had a cheese factory, a sawmill and heaps of dairy farms. It also had a lot of young hard-working farming families. On our road alone there were 32 children who hopped onto the bus to go to school every day – and now there are none. Farms have become much larger, the farmers are ageing – now in their fifties and sixties, and their children have grown up and most of them have left home. The next generation can’t afford the farm nor the farming life and most opt to make their living outside a rural community for themselves and their own children. How did this happen?
Everyone loves things to be cheap and the supermarkets have listened to the masses and have applied pressure on food prices to get more customers to visit their stores.
The farmers who have survived these current low prices have had to be resilient and efficient to still be farming. Farms have become larger so that one farming family instead of five can make a living on say 1000 acres.
Get big or get out.
Farmers have also embraced technology using more heavy machinery, synthetic salty fertilisers, monocultures of the best plant cultivars, agricultural poisons artificial insemination, feedlots, genetic modification.
All to survive whilst still meeting the supermarkets harsh demands to supply people with cheaper food.
But can this be sustained?
I don’t think so which is why Mungalli is trying to do things a bit differently.
We care about our rural community in fact we are trying to rejuvenate it by paying our farmers more and creating local jobs where few exist.
We care about animal welfare by allowing our stock to graze diverse pastures all year round. They aren’t stuck in filthy feedlots being fed corn soy and feed by-products.
We care about biodiversity in everything we do from soil microbiology, to diverse pastures and naturally bred cattle. We have replanted rainforest, fenced off wetlands and encouraged native fauna to return.
We care about the environment – we don’t use salty chemical fertilisers, or agricultural poisons that poison the soil and waterways for generations to come
We care about our farms so that they will remain productive and dynamic for generation’s to come.
We are rejuvenating the land by practising biodynamic farming practices, which build’s up organic matter levels in the soil, improves soil structure and stimulates recycling.
And mostly we care about our customers who get to eat the best quality food we can possibly produce, that hasn’t been over processed.
Unfortunately this all costs a bit more and I would like to thank our customers who are willing to pay that little bit more for our clean great tasting food.
After seeing you speak at the Taste of Tablelands it changed the way I shop for my family. After reading this it reinforces the need for all of us to support those like yourself, who are trying to do things differently. For our community, our health and more importantly our children.
Wow Kristy, what a powerful comment! It’s really inspiring for us to read things like this. Thank you!
All these things sound promising. And I am happy to pay more for a good product. But it says happy cows on your packaging. No mother can be happy when it’s baby it taken away from it. What is your policy on male (bobby) calves?
Hi Helen, thank you for your question. Here at Mungalli we are running an Adopt-A-Bull program. We successfully rehomed many of our bobby calves to caring humans and we are always looking for more carers. If you are interested in it please get in contact, so you can be added to our mailing list.