Joel Salatin @ Daylesford Organics

So as we come to the end of autumn we also come to the end of The Harvest Festival.

We had a fantastic week running and attending activities, but of course the highlight was the self proclaimed lunatic farmer himself Joel Salatin.

Thanks so much to DMP and to The Lake House who brought Joel out from America. The Daylesford Organics team attended every seminar he gave, but the best part of all came last Friday when Joel came to our farm to walk around and talk to us.

Nine years ago when we started farming organically and were on the steepest learning curve imaginable, it was Joel's books that advised us on many of the particulars like movable chook houses and electric netting fencing and indeed gave us permission to believe we could do it.


When not many other farmer's wanted to share their knowledge with us, Joel's books did.


Nine years ago, many of Bren's sentences started with 'Joel says...' and this renegade farmer gave us permission to do things in an unconventional way and to make our farming dream a reality.

Nine years later on a wild and wet afternoon, Joel came to our farm and spent the best part of an hour walking around, looking at our systems and discussing our plans with us. Of course he recognised a lot of his own systems and ideas but he was also very complimentary and interested in our methods too.


It was one of those fantastic full circle life events. Here we were with the master showing him what we had learnt but also how we had developed our own farming systems.


We spent the last part of Joel's visit discussing future directions Daylesford Organics could take and let me tell you, watch this space because we are pretty excited to put some of his suggestions in place.


As Joel was leaving our farm Bren asked him to sign one of his books. The book is called You Can Farm and in it Joel wrote 'Oh yes you can - and yes you are.' How cool is that!

Saturday brought with it the publication of one of my photos in the A2 section of The Age newspaper. There was a 'top 5 farm gates' and they listed us as number one.



When I opened the newspaper up in the car park of the local service station I screamed. Loudly. I was thrilled they had made us number one and that my photo was enormous.

I guess we do owe an apology though to those who read the bit in the paper and then came to visit us yesterday only to find we were closed. Unfortunately, while we knew the piece in the paper was coming, we had no idea which date it would be published and it was bad timing that it coincided with an all day seminar by Joel. The seminar was called 'How to scale up without losing your soul' and was attended by our whole team leaving no one to man the stall.


We do feel terrible if you made the journey and we weren't here and hope that you found other ways to busy yourselves in the area.


Have a great week out there.

Our cover boys.

Look at those gorgeous boys on the cover of this week's The Weekly Times.

I know you might think I'm biased, but it really demonstrates their special relationship perfectly. Look at the way Bingo has his leg on Bren's leg and the way they are staring into each others' eyes. Love it!

This morning when we were driving out to take the girls to school, one of the chook fences was down and Bingo was patrolling the border making sure none of his precious chickens escaped. One of the girls joked that the chooks wanted to head into town to buy the paper that they too were on the cover of.

This is what the cover looks like and no, the 'Mutton madness' has nothing to do with us. There is another photo and article on page four but the real, full length article will be in next week's issue.

Who would have thought that Victoria's mainstream rural paper, 'The voice of the country since 1869' would put a half page photo of an organic farmer on its cover? Good for you for moving with the times Weekly Times.

I made him pose for this photo when we went to buy the paper this morning, but I wish I'd also taken one of the excited newsagent staff reading their copies and telling us what a great photo they thought it was.

Last week's The Weekly Times also had this photo of Bren and Joel Salatin accompanying an article about Joel's visit to Daylesford.

And I just found this photo on their website taken at last Saturday's Show Grounds Farmers' Market.

Phew, what a great week for Daylesford Organics in the news. The scrap book is getting fatter. And all of this without paying a publicist, yay!

I hope you are having a great week out there.

Daylesford Farmers' Market.

You never know who you'll bump into at the farmers' markets.

This morning two of our food heroes, Maggie Beer and Stephanie Alexander were doing the circuit at Daylesford.

Last week Joel Salatin popped by for a purple carrot.

And if you stand still long enough, you might get miked up for a segment on Daylesford for the Postcards show.

Alla Wolf Tasker told Shane Crawford all about why our eggs are different coloured, (they are laid by different breeds of chooks).

And of course there are our wonderful customers who come and see us in the heat and in the rain. You guys are the best, chuck out the rest. Thank you, you make it worth getting out of bed each Saturday.

Go and do your shopping at your local farmers' market people.

Meet and support the people who produce your food.

You never know who else might be shopping there that day too.