Enter the egg zone

I’ve got 65 chook eggs, 20 duck eggs, and 17 tiny Japanese bantam eggs in the house at the moment.

Some are in cartons, lots aren’t.

This is what you get when you have too many chooks.

And I know we’re in a perfect situation to have eggs and bacon. But even if we followed the Heart Foundation’s recommendation of six eggs per person a week, that still only gets rid of a dozen.

And we’re getting more than a dozen a day.

I shouldn’t complain, eggs were like gold during the war years. And I do genuinely feel guilty if I crack one.

I flog them off to the neighbours and work colleagues, but there are always some in the back of the fridge, on the freezer, and in the egg basket.

I’m constantly trying to make cunning plans to cut back the numbers:

If I make 12 batches of gingerbread men that’ll use 12 yolks. Then I could make three fruity pumpkin cakes with the remaining whites.

I know I can make custard with six yolks, and then turn the whites into a meringue. But I really don’t think we need two desserts on the go.

A quiche will use up two, and that’s two whole eggs, without the separation fuss.

If only the chooks understood the stress I’m under. I’m sure they’d cross their legs and hold on for a day.

I do think the bantam eggs are rather sweet, at only about three centimetres long. Do you think there could be a niche market for mini eggs? Baby carrots and beets are trendy.

The duck eggs are beautiful too, either an almost see-through white, or bluey green. And the yolks are cadmium yellow.

And the chook eggs come in all shades from deep brown to white. And they vary in size and shape depending on the age and breed of the chook. The young pullets are producing rounded brown eggs.

The pleasure of collecting eggs never fades.

One of us will always ask, ‘how many eggs did we get today?’.

We always leave the eggs if we know we've got young visitors coming.

And I love seeing Guy at the chook house holding up the bottom of his jumper, placing one egg at a time into his nest.

Snouts unearth soil secrets

In Tasmania the seasons are distinct. Spring is unpredictable: windy and wet days interspersed with sunshine. In summer the days are long and it’s usually warm and dry. Autumn - which is our favourite time of year - is calm, mild and pleasant, but winter is the most challenging: cold temperatures, short days, and high rainfall.

It’s the time of the year when being a free range pig farmer can be difficult. Mount Gnomon Farm is up against the west side of the Dial Range, just south of Penguin. It’s already a high rainfall part of Tasmania, and being directly under Mount Gnomon we seem to get extra - even compared to our neighbours just a kilometre down the road. On average we receive over 1000mm of rain a year.

Fortunately, we have the north-west’s famous chocolate soil which has a reputation for being among the finest for agriculture in the world. It’s deep, well-structured, and free draining, and it’s one of the main reasons why this region produces some of the world’s finest food.

Not everybody gets excited about dirt, but the type of soil you have is extremely important if you want to farm free range pigs without ruining your farm. Keeping pigs on the wrong soil would mean a lot of mud and soil destruction. Some consultants say you shouldn’t keep pigs outside if you get more than 800mm a year. But because we’ve got this good soil, and we’re on the crest of a hill, we can farm our pigs sustainably.

The extra rainfall is actually good - if you can put up with wearing wet weather gear six months of the year - because it helps us grow more grass and forage crops for the pigs, which of course adds to their flavour.

The pigs are amazing ploughs. We don’t put rings in their noses to stop them rooting the ground, because it’s such a natural instinct for them to turn it over with their rubbery snouts. We recently moved some of our growers close to the house so they could dig up our future berry patch and clear up the twitch and other weeds. That’s better than having to get out there with a fork.

The reason pigs like to dig is related to their taste buds - they like variety in their diet. In Europe traditionally they would turn the soil looking for nuts, worms, roots, and of course truffles, which supposedly release similar pheromones to that of a boar.

When one of the big pig breeders from the mainland visited our farm she was amazed at just how much our pigs root. They don’t do that at her place, she said. But we’ve not seen a free range pig in Tasmania do otherwise, except when it’s bone dry in summer.

We think it’s perhaps the extra moisture and the fungi in the soil that encourages the excessive digging. Tasmania’s soils have extremely high and diverse fungi populations. It’s partly because we have limited numbers of termites, so fungi play a vital role in breaking down plant material and making nutrients available to plants. If you looked in our bush or explored the local Tarkine rainforest you’d find a huge variety of fungi. But whether it’s the lure of a truffle or a wriggling worm, pigs certainly get a lot of pleasure from using their powerful snouts.

The other good thing about the soil and its related biodiversity is that it helps our pigs build up their immune systems. It also gives them essential iron. In commercial piggeries farmers actually have to give iron shots to their piglets to prevent them becoming anaemic.

Our red soil has lots of iron in it, and the piglets start nibbling away at it when they’re only a few days old. We wonder just how much soil a pig actually eats in its lifetime, and we’d like to know more about how the soil contributes to the flavour of the meat.

The day of the rooster

When Guy was a child he was banned from breeding chooks.

I can understand being barred from the biscuit tin, or taken away from the tv, but how often do parents have to sanction chook breeding?

At his worst Guy had 200 in the backyard. And pocket money wasn’t covering the feed costs.

I think it’s genetic. Guy’s brother Mark has the same trait - it just took a little longer to show. He was in his early 20s before he started to breed unusual numbers. He’s now got one of the best collections of rare breed Japanese bantams in Australia.

When we moved to the farm I was pretty excited that Guy came with chooks. I had pots and pans, a washing machine, two guinea pigs, and two Indian Runner drakes, but they didn’t produce eggs for my cakes and quiches.

However, I was a little surprised when the chooks took more than one ute load to deliver.

Our main types are Buff Sussex (a rare breed) and Rhode Island Reds.

Then we’ve got a few white bantam crosses apparently because they’re good sitters. Very good sitters. So good you think a bit of natural selection’s been going on (the bush is teeming with quolls and devils), then three weeks later they’re back from the dead with a dozen mongrel chickens under their feet.

We’ve also got a breed called “Guy’s Specials”. They’ve got an unusual combination of genes - they turn out grey and speckled - so of course we’ve got to keep them going.

One night I flopped back on a bale of hay, exhausted, and turned my head to the left to see a chook settled on a nest of eggs. I looked up at Guy, questioningly.

“They’re due out next week,” he said.

Right. So he’s deliberately and secretively putting eggs under chooks.

So why does Eliza let Guy get away with it?

Because she knows that every rooster that hatches will end up in her crock pot. And there’s nothing better than a roasted rooster, with thigh meat dark as lamb (see red meat vs white meat blog), served up with veggies from the garden.

When it comes to doing the deed, it’s obviously the man’s job to use the axe. And gutting, of course.

But why is it the woman’s job to take the scales and claws off the feet just because she has finer fingers?

I really should put my foot down.

Savouring pork belly

Last night we shed our farm clothes and found some glitz at the back of the wardrobe to attend Burnie's Savour Tasmania dinner at Bayviews Restaurant, featuring Simon Bryant from ABC TV's "The Cook and the Chef". It was great that such an event was held in the north-west and it was exciting for us to have a high profile chef use our pork on his menu.

This is the moment when we snuck in to the kitchen to see our belly being prepared and Simon said, "Is this your pork?". We were so proud. We believe that it was the first time that Simon had used Wessex Saddleback, and he was pleased with the quality of the product. With him is Bayviews' executive chef Pat Sheriff.

The menu was six courses featuring green lip abalone, ocean trout, (pork belly), angus beef cheek and wagyu striploin, and a pepperyberry vodka chocolate parfait.

Pork belly - yummo!

(About midnight....Simon had been posing for lots of photos and it was well past farmers' bedtime.)

Celebrating 12 months on the farm

It’s been a year since we backed a rent-a-truck up to the garage, unloaded our furniture, and lit the first fire in our woodheater.

And it’s a year since we drove a horse-float of sows up the driveway, and walked our boar Domino down the lane, past a pig-rooting miniature horse we inherited with the property.

(Sandy, 28, had an inbuilt hatred of pigs, apparently common in horses. He now lives with Eliza’s mum, for fear of a heart attack the pigs might provoke).

We thought it would be good to take this chance to look out the window and reflect on what we’ve done over the past 12 months - instead of just looking out and making a list of what we still need to do.

We’ve built our breeding herd from 10 to 20 sows and have been producing pig meat each week for the past seven months. It is amazing to think that with our small herd we are now the largest free range pig farmers in Tasmania, and we believe we have the second largest herd of Wessex Saddleback sows in the world.

With so many pigs breeding, we’re now seeing some of the genetic traits that we thought were lost coming back. Large litters are appearing on a regular basis. Phantom, our star sow, has got 13 piglets at the moment, and last litter she had 12. But while about half of our sows are having these big litters, we’ve still got ones producing only six or seven, so there’s still improvement to be made.

Thousands of metres of wire and hundreds of posts have been set up to keep in the growing number of pigs. The neighbours say we could keep in rhinos.

About 600 native trees have been planted in shelter belts to buffer us and the pigs against the amazing winds that come from the west and to increase the habitat for native birds. Why wasn’t there wind on the day when we came with the real estate agent? It blew constantly for six months after settlement.

Guy squeezed 40 fruit trees into the orchard, with Eliza telling him that if he was going to put them in that close together it’d be interesting to see what his pruning skills were like when they grew a bit.

The veggie garden is providing all our vegetables. Guy has agreed to leave Eliza to it, and not make comment about the ‘artistic’ layout or her extreme water efficiency.

The pigs are still digging up the future berry patch...

We’ve survived our first couple of Business Activity Statements. Just. A good hot meal, beer, and plenty of ham seems to encourage our accountant to wade through our lounge floor filing system.

And we think we’re making a bit of progress on the big goal – bringing back the Wessex Saddleback and teaching people about rare breeds, real food, and ethical meat production.

It’s rare for a weekend to go by without a chef or a family dropping in to watch the piglets run around and scratch a grunting sow.

We’d like to thank everyone who’s helped us on the farm, bought our pork, and heartily promoted what we’re doing. One of the main highlights of the past year has been meeting like-minded, passionate people.

While we’re proud of our first 12 months on the farm, we’re quite aware that this is still just the beginning of the journey.