How to host a music festival on a farm: Beef producer talks logistics

Loch Hart Music Festival has just hosted its fifth event along the Great Ocean Road at Princetown, on a beef property home to 900-head of cattle and a school camp.

The festival's operations manager Tess Birch said her and her partner Jayden Bath, the festival organiser, knocked on about 20 farmers' doors before finding Mr Bowker.

Ms Birch said Mr Bath, a Colac export, hailed from a family of shearers and farm fence builders who understood where the ideal farms could be for festivals.

"They were a mix of farms in the Colac Otway and Corangamite shires," she said.

"We have an email that Jayden sent to Matt Bowker, it's a huge essay of an email about the festival and whether it would be okay to chat about it, and Matt sent back a one-line 'sounds good'."

Kangaroobie Camp owner and beef producer Matt Bowker said his property had originally been a back-up location for another Victorian music festival, Falls Festival, and he had the event outlay ready to go when he was approached by the Loch Hart organisers.

"I always had it in the back of my mind that it was a good place to have a music festival," he said.

Mr Bowker is a sixth-generation farmer on a property adapted to host school camps since the late 1970s.

He said the property regularly hosts events including the Kangaroobie Klassic, an adventure race, and the Kangaroobie Base Camp Ultra Relay.

"It was really tough to make any living off a farm in the 70's, so my parents looked at it and thought they needed to do something else," he said.

"Throughout history, everyone in Australia has had an uncle or parent on a farm, during school holidays you'd go on a farm and help out but that link was getting lost as cities were getting bigger."

Mr Bowker said they were able to set up the festival to separate the cattle from the area, managing the grazing and cutting silage a week before the event kickoff.

The festival ensures no-glass and no-pet policies, with security checks on any entering vehicles, and providing reusable cutlery and crockery.

"Often you've got issues around people potentially breaking glass and stepping on it, but then there's the issue of if someone breaks a bottle you're not going to be able to clean up all of it and you can't have cattle eat that," he said.

"The people that come to the festival are just so relaxed and so happy, the cleanup at the camp site took not even ten minutes to go around and pick up the bags people left behind.

"My son went to [another festival] and he drove out and the place was trashed, he said people left whole tents and couches and all sorts of stuff everywhere.

"That's not the attitude that people come to our festival with."

Mr Bowker said alongside recycling cans, this year was the first year they have trialled recycling human waste, through drop toilets, to benefit the farm.

The drop toilets provide sawdust for covering solids to later be composted, while the urine is later used for urea spraying.

"We drain all the urine out so it's just the solids and after four months they'll be well-composted and put onto one of the paddocks," he said.

"Up until this year we've had portaloos which were pumped out and taken onto the local sewage treatment plant.

"This year we have this solution which is a far better solution and far more effective."

Mr Bowker said after the festival clean-up, he would let the paddock rest and have a "good shower" of rain before moving cattle back in.

"It's very sandy soil so the beauty is that everything leeches through pretty quickly," he said.

He said with hundreds of visitors entering the farm, he remained confident the farm was unlikely to face biosecurity issues.

"Because we have a different group of kids coming every week feeding cows, we always have that biosecurity thought in the back of our heads," he said.

"What I'm confident of is that people aren't coming from farms onto our place, but mostly driving from towns or cities so there's a very low biosecurity risk."

Ms Birch said the festival attendees were a mix of metropolitan and rural residents.

"It's a bit of a mix, we have a strong crowd from the very local area, but we get a lot of people in from Warrnambool, Geelong and Melbourne," she said.

"We've always tried to get local bands and have as many local staff and suppliers as possible."

Mr Bowker said the festival fostered a positive environment and can-do community feeling with its attendees, which helped leave paddocks clean and free from waste.

"It makes it far easier for me to say that it's worthwhile doing," he said.

"It's good fun, and that's what I try to do in my life is do fun things because that's what gives you joy," he said.