MARNIE and Shane Ellis, Applebox Farm, annexed 10 acres from a dairy farm at Glengarry West, Victoria, for their free range egg business.
They attended a workshop focussed on earning an income from small acreage holdings and, deciding on their commodity, their egg farm grew rapidly. At the end of their second year, they were housing 2000 hens.
"It was consuming our lives," Ms Ellis said.
They revisited their business plan and decided their optimum chicken numbers were 700. From that restart, they have progressed and sell the bulk of their produce to local chefs and retail outlets.
Chickens arrive on the farm at 17 weeks old, four times a year, and are kept for 12 months, housed in purpose-built chook caravans in paddocks with electric poultry fences and guarded by Maremma dogs and alpacas. Stocking density is very light, at 100 chickens/hectare.
“We stagger the delivery of the birds, to rollover the laying,” Ms Ellis said.
“Each caravan holds 400 birds. At the end of 12 months, the birds are sold to backyarders – I have a long list of people wanting to buy them.”
The chickens follow heavy hooved animals, in a 48-hour rotation.
“The chooks’ first choice is the manure piles, then they move onto eating the grass,” Ms Ellis said.
“Pasture is a critical part of the chook’s nutrition. Sunlight is also an important factor – for the chooks, in their sheds and on the pasture.
“We also provide an apple cider vinegar and garlic solution in water; and added nutrients in their pellets,” Ms Ellis said.”
Pest control included regularly treating the wooden perches for red mite.
Grazing chickens free range has had an impact on pasture quality.
“We benchmark the pasture against the dairy farm next door. The first year we got rid of capeweed and marshmallows and increased the clover and grass species diversity,” Ms Ellis said.
Other infrastructure includes a shed where the harvested eggs are graded by machine and packed by hand.
They have also learned to diversify, not putting all their eggs in the one basket.
"We want a diverse, vertically integrated farm, paying its way," Ms Ellis said.
Three retail outlets, five restaurants and one farmers’ market account for 70 per cent of sales; one restaurant buys 160 dozen eggs weekly. They also operate a farm-gate and farmers’ market presence to sell extra eggs, fruit from their orchard, vegetables from the garden and meat from their sheep flock and 12 cattle they raise each year.
The couple use social media to market their produce.
“People want to know where their food comes from, how it’s treated and how fresh it is,” Ms Ellis said.
“We have to be the people setting the food agenda, selling our food and talking about our food; not a middleman. We sell all our produce within 15 km of the farm gate.
“Our customers believe in animal ethics and you can’t hide, so you have to do it right.”
The couple’s story has become so popular, they now hold regular workshops to show other people how to vertically integrate an agricultural production system.
“We also tell our story of how we produce our food at the workshops,” Mrs Ellis said.
“We found so many people stopped by to find out what we were doing, it affected our own productive time, so now we have set times and days.
“This could be a primary income, a secondary income if you have an adult child working on the farm or if someone wants to downsize their work onfarm.
“We started with a business plan and it was about diversity – we didn’t want a monoculture. The important thing, though, is to have a business plan and get your costing right.”