Located 15 km from Rotorua the farm is 140ha of rolling hills and thick native bush. Our family purchased the property 15 years ago and committed to preserving and restoring its natural beauty. In the last few years we have planted over 6000 native trees around the property as well as restoring and protecting a large wetland area. Our next project is to retire over 10ha of hillside that is part of the Waiteti Stream catchment and regenerate it with native bush and manuka.
On our farm we believe in working with nature, not against her – this is why we don’t use pesticides, herbicides or any of those other nasty chemicals on our pasture. Our soil health is key to growing healthy strong grass, so we nurture our soil’s microbial ecosystem. The farm currently has a system in place to capture 5000L of rainfall a day (on average), and all wastewater from the factory, farm dairy and effluent from the cows. This is then stored and used as an extremely nutritious fertilizer to irrigate our paddocks, this way we never use fresh water to irrigate. We have modeled that the entire farm dairy and milk processing factory only uses 10,300L of fresh water a day for cleaning and processing up to 7500L of milk.
Our farm has a herd of around 250 Holstein Friesian cows, our cows are extremely well looked after and very well fed. Our cows are mainly pasture fed but sometimes supplemented with products that would otherwise end up being wasted or in landfill, such as brewers grain, rejected produce from supermarkets such as carrots, grapes and pumpkins. We believe a well fed cow is a happy cow.