Our family has farmed this land now for 4 generations never with any sense of ownership but always driven by the knowledge we nurture the land for the generations to come. This outcome was inevitable a century ago but is no longer with the massive expansion of technology and the advent of chemical farming and so to achieve this today requires informed and clever management.
Along with 25 acres of vines we also raise sheep and cattle producing fine merino wool and meat and grow cereal crops mainly for our own use. These different enterprises are environmentally complimentary and help to allow efficient and economical production without producing disease or pest pressure. Thus by alternating grazing of paddocks by sheep and cattle internal parasites are reduced in each species (as they are species specific), without the need for chemical drenches. Similarly in the vineyard, grazing sheep in the Autumn and Winter prevents excessive weed growth and converts that growth into manure, feeding soil fertility.
This incorporation of different enterprises into the one farm allows the development of the so called closed system of farming advocated by Rudolph Steiner in his lectures on a new system of farming in 1924, subsequently named Biodynamics. This uses a diversity of species and methods to emulate the complexity and interrelationships of nature within a productive farm allowing economic production of food and fibre with minimal inputs whilst also improving soil structure and wider environmental health.
