They say the secret to good soil structure is that it can retain water, yet drain. Friable enough so roots don’t rot when it chucks down rain, but moist enough so plants don’t die of thirst in summer. It doesn’t matter whether you’re growing cabbages or cows, all the energy comes from the sun and the only way to harvest that in the field is through plants, and plants need good soil. Shame so much of our continent’s topsoil has been squandered over the years, some blown onto New Zealand, much of it washed down the streams and rivers.
I spread dolomite around to alter the pH of the soil. A little seaweed meal here and there too. I raked out old silage and hay. I don’t know if it’s good luck or good management, but there’s more grass and more vigour in the place now than during my first year. But it still wasn’t enough. Grass, as I’m beginning to understand, is the key. And the key to grass is the soil. A farming friend who’s nearly finished his PhD reckons we know more about the structure of the moon than the soil that—in the end—feeds, clothes and houses us. More about moon dust than the dirt we cultivate beneath our feet.
Each winter, I’d come to realise that my particular corner of the world was always going to pose serious challenges. The rich, fertile soil in the valley floor can become too wet and drains too slowly for most crops. The small patch of earth that faces north and grows grass is probably too small to support any cows long-term, even with the improvements and additions I’d been making since arriving at Puggle Farm. Something had to give.
While winter shows up the failings of our farm, it’s also my favourite time of year. The good news is that we can huddle inside. It’s okay to cocoon, to put on some warm boots (okay, so they are Ugg Boots) and close the curtains at five o’clock. It’s okay to light the fire in winter. It’s a good time to have meat slow-cooking in the oven overnight.
I would often braise beef shanks in the cooker, with leftover wine, tomato, a ham hock and some cinnamon. Or pull out some blade and cook it down with lashings of garlic and a few bay leaves. Most of the melting soft, slow-cooked meat we’d eat as stew; the rest we’d freeze in small batches with lots of the cooking juices, ready to be tossed with butter through hand-rolled pasta. Or bought pasta, on nights when I was too tired, lazy or late to cook.
The house smelled glorious when I used the cooker. But the shape of Puggle Farm’s cottage, with the chimney in the middle and the bedrooms upstairs, meant that I would wake to the smell of things ready to eat. At two in the morning I’d be having dreams about bacon baked beans, about ossobuco, about a dangerously dark beef shin daube redolent of orange and star anise. My dreams on those nights were always about long, luxurious meals, often heavy on the meat or pulses. By the time the morning came around, I’d be ravenous.
It was during one of these winters, sitting in front of the fire with a Tassie whisky in hand, that Sadie and I had one of those heart-to-hearts. Should we be sensible and realise that Puggle Farm was only ever supposed to house three chooks, and maybe some sheep, two pigs and no cow? Or possibly a cow for only a small part of the year? Should we make the wise choice and let go of the market business I’d built up, sell our breeding stock and let the farm recover?
Or should we, just should we, do the crazy thing? Should we buy more land and instead of destocking, increase our stock? I had fallen in love with the work outdoors. I had learnt some things, like which way up a star picket goes. And there’s still more than a lifetime’s worth of learning to be had on the land.
We might have decided to just destock; it would have been the easiest thing to do. But the next night Sadie and I ate a roast shoulder of our own pork. And as we greedily snapped up crackling and almost couldn’t believe the clean, fresh flavour of the pork—I still get this buzz—we decided we needed to keep doing this. If we didn’t, what would we eat? And if we had more land, we could have more pigs. And more cattle for beef, and we could dry-age the meat so we’d have surplus to share the joy.
I was smitten with the farming side of our life. I enjoyed trying to reacquaint people with food that had been grown and raised and prepared with ethical treatment and flavour at its core. I wanted to spread that word further, I wanted others to try the kind of food we managed to put on our table throughout the year, so they’d be inspired to give it a go, growing their own food themselves.
So we went to the bank. We’d found a 70-acre piece of dirt with no house on it, about ten minutes from Puggle Farm, which was close enough for us to commute. We’d worked out how much money we’d need to buy the property, including some to make the structural improvements that it would take to get the place up and running as a mixed farm, earning an income with pigs almost from day one. And we borrowed 110 per cent of the value to get it.
Then we needed a brand. Something that tapped into what we were known for, but also a name that rejoiced in the old-style, free-range animals we hoped to raise and rear. While the property is officially called Newlands, after a farm that was in Sadie’s family, it’s known to the rest of the world as Fat Pig Farm.
All we had to do, once the ink was dry on the purchase, was start working it.
Slow-roasted rib-eye with stout and mustard
Serves 8–10
My favourite cut of beef for roasting is rib-eye, cooked on the bone for maximum flavour.
2 kg (4 lb 8 oz) beef rib-eye on the bone
125 g (4½ oz/½ cup) French-style mustard
3 tablespoons stout
6 garlic cloves, crushed
1 teaspoon freshly milled black pepper
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 teaspoons salt
Preheat the oven to 250°C (500°F/Gas 9) or use a kettle-style barbecue. Trim the rib-eye, if needed, and score the fat. Mix the mustard, stout, garlic, pepper, oil and salt together and rub well all over the outside of the meat. Allow to stand for about an hour at room temperature.
Put the meat in a roasting tin and roast for 15 minutes, then turn the oven right down to 110°C (225°F/Gas ½)—take care, some ovens switch off around this temperature, and on others the thermostats aren’t very reliable. Cook for about another hour for quite pink meat. Crank the oven up again to 220°C (425°F/Gas 7) for a bit to make sure the outside is nice and hot, then rest under foil for 15 minutes before carving.
Kale
Water. Take a look around every paddock, every time you’re in the country, and you might not even see the water. But each paddock, each field, has a source of water, if not for livestock, then for crops. Under the earth and along fence lines are countless kilometres of pipe, feeding into baths and troughs, some gravity fed, some using a siphon, some connected to pumps. Most for livestock work on a float valve, the kind of thing that sits in your cistern above your dunny and allows the water to run and stop before overflowing.
Fat Pig Farm, 70 acres of valley floor near Cygnet—the neighbours call it ‘the gully’ but the joke is on them; we have all their topsoil!—has plenty of water compared to many farms. Seven dams. At least three seem to be spring fed, and there’s also a winter creek. The farm is close to drought-proof with plenty of clean fresh water. But allowing livestock to trample and soil the creek or dam isn’t the most efficient use of this important resource, so we had to figure out how to get the water up, out of the valley floor, to the cows, pigs and sheep who generally live above the water line. How to pipe water into every paddock without power to drive a pump, without the risk of a siphon failing. It turns out pipes cost a bucket. The fat ones, which we needed, are a nightmare to unroll, and they don’t bend at right angles like your fences do. Add in right-angle joiners, T-junctions, taps, time, the expense of float valves, hole saws to drill through bathtubs salvaged from the tip, and our smug satisfaction at having chosen such a well watered piece of land faded.
When you factor in rotational grazing, it’s even more complicated. Rotational grazing involves moving the herd regularly to new grass, a process that mimics the migration of grazing animals, and is believed to help improve soil depth and structure. But it
means you ideally want water in the middle of a paddock, so you can radiate your grazing cells out from a central water source, or at several points along the paddock. You don’t want it in one corner. Suddenly, what you don’t even notice as a non-rural dweller ends up looking like a 10 000-piece jigsaw puzzle. What’s worse, there was me, with neither the skills nor the knowledge to put it all together.
Water, like fencing, is one of the things non-farmers take for granted when we look at the landscape. We don’t see the time, money and effort that’s gone into creating a place where plants or animals can thrive. Nor the lattice-like system of pipes that wrap around each property like the structure of a lung.
There’s a big difference between a small-holding and a farm. The issues of water and fencing don’t get easier with kilometres of the stuff rather than metres. Livestock don’t move any easier just because you’ve got more land. Birds of prey, weeds, nocturnal visitors to the feed bins are no easier to control. In fact, those things are harder to manage, because what works when feeding two pigs doesn’t work for 42.
When I have an idea, whether it’s to keep going with the market against the odds, or take on a new property, I leap in with no great plan other than to do whatever currently gets me excited about producing food. Sadie, on the other hand, takes what I say about dollars per pig and cost per fence and price per kilo of bacon and writes it all down.
But even with Sadie’s oversight, Fat Pig Farm was a shock to the (financial) system.
The road in, which was flooded at the bottom and impassable for a two-wheel drive when we took possession of the place, needed work. I just hadn’t planned on more than $5000 worth of work: 300 metres of grading, 160 tonnes of gravel, and we blew our budget by a factor of three. That about spells out how much we learnt about a big farm. In the first few months we spent every penny of the surplus we’d borrowed, and more. Urgent jobs, like building a dunny and putting in a water tank, simply fell off the list. At the time of writing, we still have no potable water and no toilet onsite.
The same shock happened with fencing. A few simple pig and garden fences set us back nearly $11 000. I underestimated the length of every water pipe by at least half. Did you know that irrigation pipes should be dug in by tractor? Well, I didn’t. Add another $65 an hour for that. Kink a pipe and it’s a $50 joiner. Every pipe in a dam has a filter, a non-return valve and a pipe joiner. Every cheap bathtub from the tip shop needs a float valve and connectors. That’s a cool $120 or so. Every pig paddock needs a pig dripper ($50), more pipe ($25) and joiners ($25). The electric fencing requires hundreds of plastic insulators, joiners, insulated wire to go under gates, tensioners, star pickets ($7 a pop), temporary fence posts (ditto), wires and reels.
What all that means is a big farm, unless it’s already set up to do what you want it to do, is a big expense.
We discovered all that over the months. But the dream remained—to grow a lot of food, and a wide variety of food. One big priority, after sorting out the livestock, was to get a large garden started.
Sadie and I worked like mad to put systems in place to try and reduce some of the workload. The pigs I moved to a siphon system that fed their drippers and wallows, in paddocks that could be rotated every six months. That cut out the need to start the pump every couple of days or clean out their drinking troughs. The new garden was connected to a fire-fighting petrol pump on the big dam, with a hose for filling watering cans, and most importantly, lines running down each garden bed with drippers every 60 centimetres. All I had to do was leave the pump running for an hour and the formerly dry ground was moist and (possums willing) bountiful. The cattle paddocks now had a strip of mains-fed electric wire along one side, so it was easy to hook up a temporary fence to create grazing cells. And Cari the Kelpie was, well, just as hard to manage as always. One part highly strung purebred working dog, two parts puppy, three parts spoilt mutt who would come when called only if it suited her.
Puggle Farm’s vegetable patch, which is only the size of a normal domestic vegie garden, really, was hard enough to manage even after I’d netted it for possums. In Tassie, because of the long seasons, you need a decent space to have both summer and winter gardens. Our winter crops all need nearly a metre square (that’s per broccoli, or per cabbage, or per cauliflower or kale), and they have to go in before you’ve harvested your summer crops. So you need summer beds that you can leave crops in while still planting the winter beds. In other words, you need space. Luckily, some of the cash we blew in the first two months on Fat Pig Farm was on creating garden space. If anything, too much space.
First, we put the pigs in the garden. This did two things. Well, three. While the pigs were in the future garden space, I could set up their dedicated paddocks and put in their water pipes without having a boar sniffing around behind me. The pigs, meanwhile, could turn over the long grass in the garden, saving us work later. And the tonne or so of feed that I’d give them over the time they were in the garden area would all get turned into that magical other entity—poo.
Left to its own devices, a pig will spend around 60 per cent of its waking day looking for food, whether it’s actually hungry or not. In fact, they don’t really know whether they’re hungry or not. If you don’t regulate their feed they can become obese, like Labradors. A free-range pig will spend most of this 60 per cent of the day with its head in the dirt. They root around looking for things to play with, to manipulate, and to eat. Allowed to express their instincts, they keep busy, moving dirt. Hence they can plough up ground at a phenomenal rate. This became a problem at Puggle Farm as we ran out of fresh, dry ground after a phenomenally wet winter, but was a useful thing at the big farm, with new ground to be dug up.
Our pigs had two months to turn the soil in the garden at Fat Pig Farm; not really long enough considering the space. They trampled and pooed and dug. And then, after they went to their more permanent home in the paddocks next door, we got a local bloke, Marty Brereton, to disc the surface with his tractor a couple of times, to break up the remaining crust. After that, it was the slow, backbreaking work of turning huge clods of earth and grass into long garden beds. Each 12-metre bed took about a day to create. And we made about fifteen garden beds that summer and autumn.
Modern farm work doesn’t necessarily make a farmer fit, what with tractors and rotary hoes and harvesters (though I reckon Marty could still chuck a hay bale further than most men). But old-style farming, where you hoe and dig and work the soil by hand, that work is better than any gym around. What’s more, there’s something to show at the end, besides a six-pack and some tight pecs.
One thing we did for filming was get in a microbiological soil enthusiast. Letitia Ware is a firm believer in the fact that it’s the bugs in soil that can give a plant immunity, energy and, ultimately, nutritional supremacy. By bugs I mean microscopic worms, bacteria and fungi. And there are proven ways to assess and enhance the microbial action in your soil, apparently. For Gourmet Farmer we filmed the making of two of the fifteen garden beds—one for Letitia to do as she saw fit; the other one right next to it, with the minimal intervention we would’ve done with our limited resources and time.
Letitia’s bed was dug deeper. We dug in compost (every gardener’s friend) and alpaca poo. We applied a mineral blend that was a bit more complex than the one we used on the rest of the garden. She finished the bed with lucerne chaff and mulched it with straw.
For our bed, we dug down a bit to loosen the soil, put in the tiny bit of compost we had, mulched with hay because that’s all we had and did nothing else. We were doing things more cheaply.
We propagated and planted identical varieties of heirloom vegetables in both beds. And then Letitia added to her garden bed a microbial soup that she’d bred up at home. She applied it a few times over the growing period too. The idea, and I don’t know if it came through on telly, was to show the importance of soil microbial health on plant health.
The results were dramatic. Our vegetables were small, mean and, i
mportantly in a blind taste-test, relatively bland. Letitia’s were big, healthy looking and super-duper delicious.
Now, the true test of the garden bed may not have been the microbes Letitia added. It could’ve been any number of the things she added that we didn’t, like compost and poo. It could be argued that it was simply the additional poo and compost, complete with their own microbial load, which enhanced her bed.
But behind the scenes, something else was going on. Out of shot of the camera were other beds that Sadie and I had dug. These didn’t get anything else of Letitia’s besides a bit of the microbial brew that was surplus to her needs. She slipped a bit of this magic potion onto our other crops, and they far outstripped the trial bed Sadie and I had prepared for the camera.
These other beds, now in their second year, are all going gangbusters. The soil has improved enormously in just one year. We have now made and added a lot more compost. (One of the wonderful side benefits of animals is a lot of manure, as well as the occasional euthanised animal.) We add a lot of minerals like dolomite, ag-lime, phosphorus and the teeniest bit of boron. We’ve tried to not compress the soil, of course. And the kale and broccoli this year are almost beyond belief.
I’m a bit disappointed, really. Our kale is so big and gleaming and the broccoli heads so tight, they almost look like bought vegetables. We’re so used to producing ‘organic looking’ vegetables, complete with slug holes, which are smaller and appear slightly weaker than the ones you find in the shops, that to have such commercial-sized veg is somewhat of a letdown. Until you taste them, that is. These crops, cultivated from a former paddock with soil we’ve only been improving in the most modest of ways for just one year, using organic techniques, are already better than anything money can buy.
The Dirty Chef Page 22