On the day of our fourth anniversary at Mount Gnomon

On the anniversary of four years at Mount Gnomon: a selection of photos from our farm.

It feels significantly longer than four years - and the grey hairs and wrinkles support that!

But as the song says, all you need is love, and without love we wouldn't be here riding the roller coaster of farming.

Two pig farmers, their brave helpers, and some pulled pork

It’s taken almost a month, but I think we’re close to recovering from The Taste Festival.

Without drawing breath after Christmas, and barely having time for a shower, we packed up our pulled pork and sausages and headed for Hobart early on December 27th.

We drove in convoy, sort of. Guy sped off in the van and I lumbered along behind with the ute and trailer. We met at Ut Si Café at Perth and fueled up on ham, egg, and spinach sandwiches (funnily enough the ham wasn’t ours, Colette had run out, but it was Matthew Evans’). At this point I started to feel a bit excited about the week ahead of us.

When Guy and his brother Mark (Lost Pippin Cidery and Nursery) put in an application to have a cider and pork stall at The Taste I thought they were very optimistic.

I was sure we wouldn’t get in, both being young businesses, and having very little experience at food events. There was a nice link though, with us growing rare breeds of livestock, and Mark working to keep old fruit varieties alive. So the application went in, and I promptly forgot about it.

“Bloody hell”

I think that’s what I said when Guy told me we’d got in, but it might have been worse.

“What are two pig farmers doing going to The Taste?”

Aware that we needed some practice at dishing up tacos and sausages en masse, we attended some smaller events in the couple of months leading up to The Taste. We went to the Spring Festival at the Botanical Gardens in Hobart, the Deloraine Craft Fair, and Hobart’s Sustainable Living Festival.

And I’m so glad we had the chance to practice. We shifted around benches, lengthened bbq legs, graduated from spoons to squeezy bottles for sauces and sourcream, learnt that chopped coriander loses its aroma and plucking is worth the effort, and that Guy and Eliza work best at opposite ends of the stall.

It was a huge challenge preparing for The Taste while we were running around distributing a few hundred Christmas orders. The logistics were a nightmare, and I think we worked the hardest we have so far. But we had the most amazing staff and helpers though, like our butcher Neville who worked 12-hour days with only a 10-minute sandwich and newspaper break. Dane ran around sorting out everything we’d forgotten, and Elisha brought food, humour, and organisation as we worked from morning to midnight putting Christmas orders together.

Our new bookkeeper Andrea got the biggest Mount Gnomon baptism of fire. She thought she was coming to help us catch up with our records, but got thrown into sorting the orders, packaging, cleaning, rostering, and counseling! Guy’s sister Lauren cryovacked every single ham without a complaint, but may never eat ham again. Mark looked after everything at the Hobart end: bumping in, worrying about stall layout, signage, refrigeration, cash registers etc.

So, you can see that by the time we actually got to The Taste we were hardly running on fresh legs.

As we drove in on the first day, I felt like I was 14 again, standing in the wings at the eisteddfod ready to play my first cornet solo. I wanted to vomit and I wanted to back out and scratch from the event.

To my complete surprise, the day went really well. Our staff sorted out their jobs among themselves, and we survived the first lunchtime rush. Ian Parmenter and his team of judges came around and tasted the pulled pork taco, and while it was lovely for him to come around the back of the stall to talk pigs and have his photo taken with me, I thought that would be the height of the excitement.

But we WON the “taste plate”! It’s the top prize for a small dish priced at $8 or under. Suddenly the line grew from a few people interested in our story and free range pork, to an endless line of punters wanting ‘one of those pork things I heard about’.

We’re not fancy chefs at all, and we’ve got an awful lot to learn about food, but I think the taco went well because it was fresh and real. The pulled pork was literally just pork – no seasoning – it had just been cooked all day in fat. The salsa was fresh: chopped in time to the shuffling of the customers in line. (Knife-wielding Carol chopped tomatoes - from the Brandsemas who have been growing them for more than 50 years, chillies, onions, cabbages, and apples for a total of 70 hours accompanied by Neil Diamond and others). The sourcream was organic and came from Elgaar Farm and we managed to source almost all the coriander from our friend Graeme (Thirlstane Gardens) in the north-west.

We wanted to show that you don’t have to work in a restaurant to be able to produce yummy food – you just need really good quality ingredients. But we’ve learnt so much from talking to chefs who use our products, and from our enthusiastic, experimental customers. We really hope more producers will be inspired to have a go at food events, and bring the consumer closer to the grower.

We’d like to thank our wonderful staff and volunteers who may have not been fully aware of what they were getting themselves into. At one stage we had six Robertsons working on the stall: Mark with his cider, builder-cum-bbq-er Dane, twins Allie and Lauren, and mum Denise, and Guy.

Guy and I started The Taste race as though it was a sprint, and on day three when we hit the wall and realised it was actually a marathon, our wonderful workers let us rest and filled the gaps.

We’ve been trying to have a little break during January – in between catching up on farm jobs and attending the usual markets.

But soon we’ll be back on the taco production line… Festivale is on in Launceston from February 8 – 10, Devonport’s Taste the Harvest is on March 10, and before we know it we’ll be at Agfest from May 2 – 4.

See you there!

Two years of hard work and satisfaction

It’s our farm birthday this week – two years at Mount Gnomon Farm!

It’s been a busy and rewarding year and a rollercoaster ride of emotions. Over the past 12 months we added two more rare breeds of cattle to the farm, a rare breed of duck, a couple of rare breeds of chooks and we reintroduced a rare breed of sheep to Tasmania. It was also a year that saw us double our number of Wessex Saddleback pigs, encouraging us to find new markets. Last Christmas we somehow managed to survive the distribution of 200 hams and while it was stressful, it was a great thrill for us to see families enjoying something that we produced, on one of the biggest days of the year.

One of the highlights was being invited to Sydney by chef Alex Herbert who manages and operates the award-winning restaurant Bird Cow Fish. Alex is a big supporter of ethical food and was keen to hear our story and help us establish connections with other restaurants in Sydney. Alex gave us room in her fridge for our samples while we travelled back and forth from appointments with places like Tetsuya’s, Four in Hand, District Dining, Marque Restaurant and Quay. The response to our product was fantastic, but the realities of actually supplying some of these restaurants on a regular basis hit home. A place like Quay, where head chef Peter Gilmore has a signature pork belly dish, goes through 30 pork bellies a week. That’s about 15 pigs’ worth, or 90kg. In Tasmania the restaurants we supply use only a couple of week. There’s a lot to be said about population and running a booming restaurant business.

In November we had enough spare produce to have a stall at the local farmers’ markets in Burnie, Devonport and Evandale. Despite the early starts (a challenge for me, not so much for Eliza who’s used to it), we’ve really enjoyed the markets, as we get to talk to our customers and raise awareness about farming free range and the plight of rare breeds of livestock.

While it’s all been pretty exciting, farming has a way of quickly bringing you back to reality. The same day our first box of pork arrived at Tetsuya’s restaurant, one of our sows lost 9 out of her 10 piglets overnight. We went to bed after Marybelle had given birth to 10 healthy piglets who’d all had a good feed and looked content. But we woke to the horror of finding all but one of the piglets had lost so much weight in a few hours that despite our best efforts to feed them with a dripper we couldn’t save them. Piglets are so small and fragile and need to be fed every couple of hours to survive. In this case their mother had developed mastitis and stopped producing milk, and before we could treat her it was too late.

While the loss of piglets is an emotional blow for both the mother and us, it also hurts our small business financially and six months later puts a dent in our ability to supply our regular customers. Marybelle has made it up, fortunately, and is currently rearing a bouncy litter of 12.

At Mount Gnomon we’ve begun to realise that in farming some things are beyond your control. Just recently we lost our second sow to a snake bite. When we choose to run our pigs free range next to the bush we have to accept that sometimes snakes will come in contact with our pigs. As nature-lovers we respect that snakes are native to the environment and it would be wrong to harm them or remove them. And since they’re territorial the removal of one snake will only see another snake take its place.

The biggest change this year came when I resigned from my job with the Tasmanian Institute of Agricultural Research to take on the role of managing our growing menagerie and developing the business. After nearly two years of working full time while establishing the farm, it was a big leap of faith. If you buy a farm and have a big mortgage, you really have no choice but to work off-farm as you purchase the necessary infrastructure to get the business going. First we bought the animals, then the water infrastructure, pig housing, fencing, a four-wheel motorbike for feeding, a ute for taking the pigs to market … the list goes on. A farm is certainly a great way of spending money. Our accountant mentioned to us that at some stage we’ll have to stop spending and start making some money (Eliza’s mother agrees).

Giving up the luxury of regular payslips was a big step, and when I rang my grandmothers to discuss the move, they thought I was a bit crazy: “You’re giving up a good job to become a pig farmer?”. Both my grandmothers have spent most of their lives on farms and are aware of the struggles facing Tasmanian farmers today. While we might have a reduced cash flow, we’ve now got the time to expand our business, do our own packaging, shuffle the dreaded paperwork, and show more people around the farm. Hardly a week goes by when we don’t have a group descending on the property for a sticky-beak. The biggest highlight for me this year was having more than 35 people accepting our blog invitation to plant native trees to create shelterbelts on the farm. People travelled from all over the state to work alongside each other, and as a result of their community spirit 600 trees were planted in just a few hours.

Thank you for your continuing support of our adventure.