Em Nau Farm BLOG

The Last Three Years – A Recap

We brought Em Nau Farm in late 2011 as a lifestyle change choice.  We planned to produce our own cheese, jams, sauces and breads from our kitchen and breed chooks, dairy goats, sheep and cattle all whilst keeping up our ‘day jobs’.  

We started out keeping chickens on our suburban block after Brett contracted cancer in late 2008.  We progressed into making our own cheese, sauce and breads and with our children finishing school and moving out we decided it was a perfect time to move out of suburbia to a more laidback lifestyle even though it was only another 30 minutes up the road.

Why did we undertake the "tree change" and still keep our day jobs? - many years ago Brett read a story about a person who found a headstone that read “I lived the dash”.  These four simple words had a profound effect on Brett - you see most headstones do not tell you about the person, they tell you when they were born, when they died with a small dash to sum up their life.  We wanted to get the most out of our dashes as we could.  

How have we gone over the past three and a bit years since we arrived at Em Nau Farm.

Heather and I are enjoying and developing the sort of lifestyle we dreamed of back in 2011.  We have started to develop our orchard (limes, oranges, mangos, apples, mandarin to name a few), we have a herb garden, strawberry patch, avocado trees, grapes, chokos, pumpkins, are well on the way to being  self-sufficient through our vegie patch as well as joining Land for Wildlife (and through them started to plant native trees around the farm). 

We are breeding cattle, goats and sheep for both meat and milk as well as buying in a couple of pigs twice a year to raise to six months before dispatching for meat.  The pigs have normally dressed our around 50-70kg mark, with the sheep and goats coming in around 20kgs each.  We haven’t “home butchered” any cattle as yet but we are now looking to do this as we have raised calves born on the farm to about the age that we can comfortably send them on their way.

The milk we get from the does and cows goes into making cheese, as well as soap & lotions and for in-house consumption.

The poultry, chicken, ducks and geese, we raise are used for both eggs production and meat.  When we use our poultry for meat we are confident they have been raised and dispatched humanely.  They are free ranging for at least 90 hours a week and are “locked up” only at night so they don’t become victims of the feral animals that are around (foxes, wild dogs etc).

From what I have said you may get the impression that all the animals on the farm are heading for the freezer but this isn’t the case as we have a number of “forever” animals who are destined to spend their days eating, lazing- surveying their domain-enjoying the sun, eating, running free, eating and of course eating.  Those “forever” animals, when they do pass are taken to a nice spot and buried, normally with a little tree planted above them. 

We have a home butcher come in to do our killing, as we have found that this saves money (through travelling the 100km round trip to a factory butcher), causes less stress on the animal due to them being in familiar surrounds.  We feed them as we would normally and when they about to be dispatched they don’t suspect a thing, this upholds our ethos of treating our animals ethically and humanely and the animals go without being agitated or frightened.

Around the farm we have constructed a number of shelters and fenced a number of areas for the animals.  This is a continuing job and in the near future we will be building more permanent chicken and duck enclosures plus enhancing the sheep and goat shelters.  We also plan to expand the “garden” area with further raised garden beds, planting more native trees and plants, and fruit trees.

To sum up, over the past three and a bit years we have steadily moved towards our ultimate goal living the dash in the most beneficial way.  Each and every day we sit, looking out over the farm, thinking, how lucky are we.

Until next blog – take care and live your dash.