Graziers share wisdom
Family set to open farm for day
VERONICA and Dan Laffy sat back one day and wondered why most of their money was going into farm overheads.
They were forced to take whatever the market price was for their products, regardless of what they cost to produce, but meanwhile everyone else down the chain, including the fertiliser and chemical companies, were setting a price from which they could profit. So despite running a farming enterprise that had been in the family the best part of 100 years, they decided to ditch tradition and try something new.
In the end they decided to aim for holistic, regenerative farming practices and go organic.
Mrs Laffy said it was a move they didn’t regret despite the costs involved with the changeover.
She said the primary costs were re-fencing their grazing property at Ducklo, just west of Dalby, and adding more water infrastructure so the paddocks could be managed a lot better.
The labour outlay increased in terms of having to get out and move the cattle a lot more frequently, but things were slowly balancing out thanks to cutting out chemical costs.
Mrs Laffy said the key to success was often just talking to the right people, so they were preparing to host a field day at their farm as a way to help others take a shortcut to getting better at regenerative farming, but also to hopefully learn a thing or two themselves.
She said the day would be aimed at giving farmers strategies to reduce fertiliser and pesticide input, increase paddock species diversity, reduce top soil loss and work with the animals on-farm to create better soil.
“We’re not super experts or anything,” Mrs Laffy said.
“We’re just happy to try and get a group together and share what mistakes we’ve made and hopefully stop others making them.”
Read more in Rural Weekly, free inside The Chronicle tomorrow.