Heritage breeds produce the goods for one Blampied couple

With wife Natalie Hardy and daughter Ruby, he runs Brooklands Free Range Farms, Blampied, a smallholding nestled in an area of mineral-rich volcanic soils, known as the Seven Clusters.

They have two properties of 60 and 48 hectares, running British White beef cattle and Berkshire pigs, using regenerative farming practices.

"I grew up and spent all my childhood on a family farm, I also spent 20 years working at high end restaurants, in New Zealand, in Melbourne and in Daylesford," Mr Hurst said.

"That connection to premium, high-quality food has always interested me.

"The other thing is the size of our properties means we are not going to make a substantial living off it by trading cattle, or fat lambs, or anything on a commodity market.

"We have great soil; we have great water, we have everything here at around $5000 an acre (0.4ha).

"So it needed to be something a little bit niche, a little direct, where we are not dealing with market forces, middle men and everyone punching the ticket, on the way through."

As a front of house manager, looking after "the people side of things", chefs and owners, Mr Hurst said he and Ms Hardy both had a love of food.

Brooklands sells directly to the consumer through local and Melbourne farmers markets, and also has a small regular delivery system.

Local restaurants, such as Lakehouse, Surly Goat, Spade to Blade, Dele Daylesford, also feature Brookland's produce in their menus.

Country Style Smallgoods uses Brooklands pork to makes nitrate free hams and bacon.

"Demand for our produce is high, and we've noticed a huge increase since COVID-19 from the public wanting to know more about where their food comes from and how it is farmed," Ms Hardy said.

"We keep in touch with our consumer's direct face to face at markets, as well as updates on social media.

"We are currently having a website developed, with a on-line shop, as well as a farm gate, walk in cool room and commercial kitchen all made possible through the assistance of a state government grant."

Ms Hardy spent part of her life in Melbourne with a career in veterinary nursing, pharmaceuticals and animal nutrition.

She said she and Mr Hurst were living on a small property in Springmount, looking for the right land in the Central Highlands, which took five years to find.

"Our criteria, in no order, was decent soils, water security, slightly undulating land, and after living in the area since 2006, the Central Highlands of Victoria, around the Hepburn Shire.

"It's close to Melbourne and the larger regional towns of Victoria."

Currently, the properties ran 25 breeding cows, and a bull, producing 50-60 weaners to rising two-year-olds.

Only two cattle were processed a month when they were just over two years old.

"We have also just recently partnered with another small regenerative farm using the same grazing system as us and the same breed to help us increase stock numbers," Ms Hardy said.

"With the pigs, we run 16 sows and three boars with up to 80 growers at any one time processing about four pigs per week.

"We have plans to increase pig production a little more, but cattle are to capacity unless we find some more land."

Being a 'paddock to plate' farm, they said they wanted to keep numbers under, rather than over, as they couldn't offload during dry seasons.

"We need the ability to run the property for feed all year round no matter what the seasons throw at us, hence our regenerative grazing and rotational farming method."

Mr Hurst said he was introduced to rotational grazing on his father Sid's farm, in South Canterbury, New Zealand.

His father farmed sheep for meat, beef cattle and deer for venison, between Canterbury and Dunedin.

At Blampied, Mr Hurst said he and Ms Hardy had to fence the entire property.

"Cattle seemed a good fit - plus, after spending all of my early life moving electric fences for sheep, I didn't want to go down the sheep path again," he said.

Rotational grazing made sense, particularly with pigs.

"It just makes sense, if you leave pigs on the same patch of ground, for too long, it just becomes a moonscape - there is nothing worse than seeing a whole lot of pigs, in a dry, dusty paddock."

As a regenerative farm, Brooklands concentrated on keeping cover on soils at all times, building soil health through the biodiversity of microbes and not using any synthetic fertilizers or chemicals.

The farm was currently conducting multispecies cover foraging crop trials through the Central Victorian Regenerative Farmers Group and supported by the North Central CMA.

"Over the last two years we have trialed on an extremely compacted area that in the past was repeatedly cut for hay," Ms Hardy said.

"The results have been amazing with our last autumn sowing coming up with 11 different varieties of cereals, peas, beans, turnips, radish, vetch and chicory fertilizing with our homemade worm tea."

The farm did soil, Brix, dry matter feed tests and also checked tissues, infiltration, compaction, root structure.

They said they were about to conduct deep core carbon testing so they could document a baseline for carbon sequencing.

The farm's organic carbon sat at an average of 4.5 per cent.

Pigs and cattle were grazed two or three times on the pasture, with deep-rooted tillage radish used to break up soil compaction and feed biodiversity.

The cover crops were improving soils, and - combined with rotational grazing - were seeing native perennials return.

The couple chose British Whites as they wanted to farm a heritage breed, raised for their inherent ability to forage, adapt well to the seasons, while helping save it from extinction.

"The British Whites are known for their extremely calm temperament, which converts to a very flavorsome and tender meat and making our paddock moves very easy," Ms Hardy said.

"They have a natural resistance to many diseases due to their black points, their black pigment skin never has photosensitive issues, yet their white coats reflect the heat.

"They make amazing mothers, small calves making calving very easy, yet huge milkers with calves gaining weight fast, and we keep them on longer weaning around eight months."

Berkshire Pigs were chosen for their "energetic nature and foraging abilities.

"They have definitely cleaned up the cape weed and onion grass," Ms Hardy said.

"The Berkshires, another heritage rare breed, are a great outdoors pig as once again haven't lost that inherent ability to forage and survive outdoors.

"They are a very active pig and as opposed to laying huge amounts of fat on the outside they tend to have a lot of fat within their meat enabling more marbling."

Mr Hurst said selling direct allowed Brooklands to tell a story.

"And a point of difference helps," he said.

"The amount of questions I get, which leads into a sale, at the markets makes such a huge difference.

"People remember us, for that."

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