Update On The Farm Front

G’day everyone,

I would like to start this week's newsletter by thanking everyone who has given me the grace to explore my writing and share with you much more of my inner world. I feel extremely lucky to be a part of a community that has supported our family through the ups and downs of farming, but also in other aspects such as my amateur writing. I think it is now time to move my inner journey to a separate platform, so those of you who enjoy my searching can still access my writing and those who prefer to be kept up to date on all things farming, food and health can get their fix from the weekly newsletter we send out with your fruit and veggies.

I have now started a Substack Publication https://substack.com/@farmersearchesformeaning to continue writing about my inner searching for truth on a more suitable and easy to use platform. This will allow me to dive deeper and deeper into a world I have only just begun to explore. If you would like to follow this exploration, please use the below QR code and follow the link to subscribe to my Substack Publication. It is free and always will be, as I write only because it helps me in my searching, and I share it as one shares a meal around a campfire with a kindred spirit ... .that is to say, for the pure joy of sharing what unites us in passion.

Now, I think it's about time I give you an update on the farming front. The farm has finally been listed for sale after a long wet period slowed our progress in getting it ready. Years of pure focus on vegetable growing, turned the rest of the farm into a jungle with all the rainfall we've experienced over these years.

Now there's no need to stress, we will still be running the business and delivering your organic goodness each and every week until the farm eventually sells (we expect this will take around 6 months, maybe longer or shorter we really won't know until it sells). But we do also have someone interested in continuing to run the business, when we do finally set sail travelling around this vast country. So we will keep you updated and see if this does indeed eventuate. We want to make sure the community that has supported us for so long are cherished by the new owners, so they need to be the right fit.

It's gone from being incredibly wet to incredibly dry here on the farm, it seems like the land of extremes with no real balance. But we are putting our energy into next year's Dragon Fruit crop, as it needs some tender love and care if we are going to receive a decent harvest. We have continued our pause on the vegetable growing as the forecast for Spring was looking quite bad and we were tired of rolling the dice, only to watch all our efforts wiped out by persistent and flooding rains (not to mention the increasing population of feral deer). I guess 6 years of record breaking rainfall totals is bound to make even the bravest farmers nervous about planting crops when the forecast is showing above average rainfall.

As it turns out, there was a rare weather event over Antarctica which prevented the above average rainfall forecast to eventuate and it's been completely dry instead. However, the Bureau of Meteorology is expecting a La Nina weather pattern to establish itself by December and run through until February, which means we are likely to see above average rainfall over the summer months once again. And, after battling through summer after summer with high rainfall totals almost every year, we will not push our luck again. It's hard enough keeping the veggies we grow here alive through the best summers, let alone summers with persistent high rainfall totals and humidity making things near impossible without the use of a horrible concoction of pesticides.

So it's focusing on our orchard crops for now, and relying on all of the great farmers locally and further away, that have really done such an amazing job providing the highest quality and consistency organic fruit and vegetables we have seen coming off their farms since we began our business. We truly are so lucky to have such a wonderful network of farmers working so tirelessly to provide such awesome organic goodness for our bodies to nourish themselves on. Not to mention Akshay and his team who are up at 1am to load the trucks and make sure it gets to us on time before we pack your orders and get them delivered to you.

That's about it for now, stay tuned for next week's newsletter as I would like to continue the story about Glyphosate which I touched on a few weeks back. It's the number one chemical used to grow our food world wide (non-organic that is) and its time we learned more about it, so we can educate those who want to listen.