Our story

Our story is centred around our core values of family, community and teamwork, a learning mindset, integrity, healthy people (mind and body), profitably regenerating the farm ecosystem and the interconnectedness of all these things.

We met whilst studying at university and since then have grown together as individuals and as a couple. Soon after getting married in 2008 we joined Sarah’s expanding family farming business and moved to a beautiful property, ‘Mount Hamilton’, near Streatham in Western Victoria.. This was our first family home and where we spent the first 10 years of our married life together, bringing our gorgeous children home, Jane, Ed and George over the years!

At Mount Hamilton we had about 50% cropping (growing canola, wheat, barley, and faba beans) and 50% livestock (breeding prime lambs and trading cattle) and whilst we were managing around the pillars of people, property, and profit, it was essentially with a conventional mindset. 

It was during this time that we began to gain a greater understanding of the complexity of nature and the implications of this. The start of our learning in this area can probably be traced back to our childhood’s and many accumulative experiences along the way, however, a crucial moment came in 2014, when Sarah realised she was addicted to sugar and so, with the help of Sarah’s Wilson’s book ‘I Quit Sugar’, she quit sugar. However, it quickly became about more than just ‘sugar’. We also began to learn about ‘gut health’ and all the things that can affect our biome from the food we eat, to toxins in the home and our stress levels and of course how our gut health affects so many things, including our brain! It then didn’t take long for us to make the connection that gut health and soil health were actually pretty similar concepts and that perhaps soil was a bit more complex than we previously thought.

Overlaying all of this was our ongoing background concern that our cropping program was becoming more and more reliant on chemicals and that we were having to continually increase the rate of application and wondering how we could ever get on top of what nature kept throwing at us – dry weather, hail, frost, waterlogging – it was stressful at times and we’re still not sure if Tom started going grey from growing canola or having a baby daughter!

We have always been open to learning and new ideas and so our research into soil health began, it started slowly, but when we were introduced to the term ‘Regenerative Agriculture’ a whole new world opened up and our research began in earnest. After watching inspirational youtube video’s, reading insightful books, listening to a plethora of podcasts and having many conversations with a range of wonderful people we began to slowly implement some ‘regenerative’ practices at Mount Hamilton, including sowing a multi-species perennial pasture.

We had always thought ‘Mount Hamilton’ was our forever home, but in mid-2019 when the opportunity came up to purchase ‘Chatsworth House’, after a lot of consideration, we decided that with our passion for livestock and regenerative farming, it was a good fit, so we sold the cropping country to our neighbours and moved to Chatsworth House in early 2020.

And so our next chapter has begun.