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 masse and have applied pressure on food prices to get more customers to visit there 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.