Hello and welcome to our website!
This site is just another step in our journey with land and animal management.
Our farm is but a little slice of this wonderful landscape we live in. On a commercial scale we are only a small farm and because of that we’ve come to the realisation that we need to also be different to make ends meet and do the best we can for our land, our animals and ourselves.
Making the decision to have a sheep farm in the first place was actually a complex decision. Or was it? Despite the high school careers teacher looking perplexed at the concept, “being a sheep farmer” was always the number one goal from childhood. So, after attending Agricultural College and attaining new skills it was a case of trying to put all that knowledge into practice. There was also off-farm work on alpaca studs (here and in Europe) and a native tree nursery. Work at the nursery led to further study in Natural Resource Management and Native Vegetation identification and propagation.
Taking over the family farm was a big step and it enabled us to focus more on the merino wool aspects that we felt were important: fibre variation and comfort factor. It also provided the impetus to re-evaluate the place of our Drysdale sheep in our system; and the decision was made to convert from a commercial flock to a stud flock.
Over the years of drought and various challenges it became increasingly frustrating to be “price takers” on our produce – a universal problem in farming!
And then a neighbour taught us how to spin wool. The old-fashioned way.
Spinning wool from our own sheep was fun – and satisfying. Then we fell down the rabbit-hole of dyeing wool; to do that meant purchasing merino wool combed tops. Frustration returned! Why where we buying in wool that, although it was labelled Australian, had been overseas and back when we had paddocks full of wool here on the farm? Not only that: ours was better! Discovering that there were still local processors was exciting. We then made the big leap into getting our own wools (Merino and ‘Castledale’) turned into combed top; supporting our local economy and businesses in the process.
It has been a dream come true to be able to process our own wools into a product that is superior and has such low “miles”.
