Farm visits proving popular

Visits to the Freeranger Farm on Sundays are going well. We now have a steady stream of people coming to look at how we do things. And it's much easier for us to keep the farm running smoothly if general visits are on one set day each week.

That doesn't mean we stop people coming on other days. We will have a group from French Island Landcare next Tuesday. They want to have a look at the practical application of farm sustainability.

What we do here is based on regenerative land management principles to ensure that our activities have little or no off-site impacts. Have a look at our page of regenerative agriculture on the Friends of Bass Valley Bush website at http://bassbush.htmlplanet.com/rich_text.html

With more than half our land maintained as remnant native vegetation (part of the only riparian forest left on the Bass River) we have always been very keen to ensure that making a living from the land doesn't destroy what's important.

Freeranger Farm visits and field trips

We have just begun encouraging visits to the Freeranger Farm on Sunday afternoons. Each week we have enquiries about how we do things and there are always individuals and groups from all over the place, including schools, wanting to look at our farming methods and the way the farm has been designed to promote biodiversity as well as produce income.
Often we can meet people's needs during the week but if we can encourage most to visit on Sundays it will leave the rest of the week free to do all the things that have to be done around the property.
Many people have a virtual visit first on our website at http://www.freeranger.com.au/ - and then come for the real thing!
The visit needn't take long, but for those who want to wander through the native bush and take a look at the last remaining riparian forest on the Bass River, it will take a couple of hours or more.

Farm tour by Conservationists

Members of the South Gippsland Conservation toured the Freeranger farm on Sunday to see how we do things to achieve low environmental impact - as well as producing top eggs!
We had a discussuion about the mobile sheds, flocks of around 200 hens - each protected by a Maremma guard dog, no off-site nutrient inputs etc and then headed down to the Bass River to look at the vegetation.
This is part of the only remaining riparian forest left on the Bass.
On the way down we could see the vegetation on adjoining land, which had been identified as habitat for the endangered Giant Gippsland Earthworm. It has now been trashed by the sand extraction company which owns the land by running a herd of massive Simmental catle in the bush!
We looked as water flows in the creek which rises on the sand company land and flows through our property to the Bass. In the height of summer (particularly during drought periods) our creek is one of the only permanent contributers to the river flow. That will almost certainly end when sand extraction starts.