Why is a city dwelling engineer and his family buying a farm?

Family and close friends will know that whilst I grew up in the suburbs, I was around the age of 5 when my parents purchased a farm that the family would travel to on weekends and holidays. We spent many days traipsing over the acres chasing cattle, pushing through lantana, dragging poly pipe up creeks, and swimming in some pretty nice waterholes!

Fast-forward several decades and the allure of time on the land still rings attractive, and I loved the idea of my teenage boys having the opportunity of spending time out in the bush like I did.

However, what really kicked off the interest, enough to actually start searching for a property, was reading and listening to videos on various aspects of regenerative farming. I was seeing and hearing that much could be done better in the world of farming, and I wanted to try to implement some of the ideas and improvements I was investigating. Whilst my improvements to the Australian landscape and the food chain would be incredibly small in scale, it was nonetheless something I wanted to contribute to.

I was watching talks by people such as Dr Christine Jones, Gabe Brown, Dr Elaine Ingham, Nicole Masters and more. Here’s a few vids if you have a few hours to spare:

They are all about improving the health and biodiversity of the soil – the bacteria, fungi and other microbes and critters that make it active living soil rather than just plain dead minerals/dirt to be blown away in the wind. Grazing management plays an important role in this, along with pasture diversity which helps creates interactions between flora (trees, plants, grasses) and the soil community. This all impacts soil fertility, organic matter, and animal health, and is even becoming recognised as a key technique to capture and sequester atmospheric carbon emissions (though I’m no CO2 alarmist).

Anyway, we spent quite a few months travelling out on the weekends to inspect as many farms as possible. Despite COVID restrictions – this was a business activity! Many were out Warwick way; we put an offer and got close to purchasing one at Goomburra, and also were quite interested in a couple north of Crows Nest (the other side of Toowoomba).

None were premium flat black soil blocks used for cropping – what the Darling Downs is best known for. I wanted to run cattle and my interest in regenerative farming practises means that we didn’t have to buy ‘the best’, as we could improve it! This also had the advantage of making land much cheaper…. That was kind of important too, as Nicole had just finished many years working at the school and was working an in-between job, making finance options more limited.

We purchased, the property settling in August 2020, and that’s the story – the very short version – as to how we became farmers!