Hi, Geoff Lawton here.
And I'm back at Zaytuna Farm.
It's great to be back
and this is one of my favorite times
in the day, early mornin'.
There's lots of bird songs, everything's still.
The animals are just startin' to move around the farm
and we're startin' to get things going.
Nice to share this with ya'.
Zaytuna Farm, as it is.
I'm going to go for a little walk around
as I'm enjoying the place after quarantine
and after getting stuck,
almost not gettin' back to Australia
with the shutdown on transport.
I'm just going to take a few shots
and I'm just going to
walk and talk and show you a few points.
It's not really a tour.
It's just some like nice little parts of the property
that I'd like to show you
and let's see what events just kind of happen in front of us
as we go.
All right, so turning right around,
straight away one of my favorite companions here, Possum.
Just patiently waitin' while I'm making another film.
She's sittin' on the speed bump here
that directs water down the spillway swale
of Paradise Dam.
Recently we've been excavating with a lot of
new house sites, so we've got some lovely soft sandstone.
So it's a soft sandstone speed bump here on the spillway.
I feel undressed without a dog.
I've always had dogs.
I've got the big one and a little one.
She just waits for me everywhere.
She's my permanent companion.
She keeps the fox back and she's a guard dog as well
and she's also a bit of a cattle dog,
if you get her in control.
And just sneakin' up on me is my daughter Latifa.
You're getting ready to milk the cows aren't ya?
Yeah, all right, okay.
I'm going to get my bow.
You're going to get your what?
Bow.
Bow?
Yes.
You're going to shoot some arrows?
Yes.
All right.
Get a duck.
Oh.
Yeah, let's walk down this way.
This is one of our new house sites.
Somethin' I do a lot of nowadays, designing house sites
and designing
different permaculture subdivisions,
permaculture townhouses, permaculture real estate.
People want more sustainable livin' systems
and we design these sytems.
We design the house sites, we design the runoff water
so it works well.
This one
is one of our share property house sites
and I've enjoyed designin' it
and teachin' people about designin' it.
It will be a beautiful one, this one.
It's got the bamboo in the backdrop.
It's got a dam behind it there,
cubby house dam,
it's got lotus paddy right here, right in front of it,
with a beautiful terrace around it.
It's got three swales running off on the side the hill.
Bottom one's quite new,
but the two above are a lot more established.
And it's got a main crop garden
which converts to their shareholder's local garden.
So it will be their orchard zone one garden.
And just below are the horses in the bottom paddock
and that's who I want to go and say hello to.
So from the house site and this beautiful lotus paddy,
when we turn around
we come to one of our bottom pastures
and here's our three horses,
three different sizes.
Miniature little Max,
I call him Maximus Horsimus.
And our big thoroughbred, Jax.
And, in the background, the gray pony,
part Arab, part stock horse, Shardia.
Hey, come and say hello.
Yes.
Yeah, Jax is about 10 years old, ex-racehorse
and he's got a cold brand on the side here.
Four eight.
That means he was the fourth foal in 2008,
born to a stable with that cold brand there
is his racing brands.
But he's a little bit dressage,
well he's well-trained dressage horse,
and a beautiful ride.
I love him to death
and he's quite a character.
Here's another character.
He's got his wooly coat on 'cos we're going into winter.
This is Max, miniature horse,
and like all miniature animals, small animals,
he's got an attitude.
But he's fun and he was Latifa's first riding horse.
You got to watch he doesn't founder
'cos he's so so small.
And no one rides him now.
Any kids come they can get a ride on Max
and Shardia, who's comin' up here, the gray
under the silky oak here,
she was just about born here.
Not quite, she arrived as a young foal, just a month old.
And she's been here most of her life, nearly all her life.
She's about 10 too and she's the same age as Latifa.
They've grown up together and she's now Latifa's pony
and she's beautiful.
And she's a great ride.
Fantastic pony for Latifa and they're best of mates
and Latifa and I ride together and
this is my big boy.
Oh, he's havin' a yawn!
Isn't he beautiful?
We've got a little ridin' arena down here
to work the horses
and to get our skills up
and it's somethin' we love doin' together.
It's a full size dressage, 60 meters by 20 meters.
There's some of the features we like about the farm.
The horses there, they're waitin' to go up
to the dairy to get fed after the cows are milked.
Lookin' across the easterly slopes at Zaytuna Farm,
the hill behind gets back lit by the early mornin' sun
as it comes over the Eastern hills.
And kind of gives this lovely light through the valley
and I really like that look.
Early mornin's definitely a special time for me on the farm.
I try and always see the dawn stars.
I saw 'em this mornin'.
I hope I always see 'em.
Makes me feel like I've seen the whole day.
When I turn around the river's on this side.
This is Terania Creek and the sun's just comin' up
from the great Pacific,
over the hill behind the Channon Village.
The village is right on that hill.
It's just opposite us, we're right next to the village.
Our main crop.
Our main crop is truly a main crop right now.
So we just have four guests here at the moment.
So we have large crops and our kitchen garden produces
most of our nutrition and our main crop produces calories,
so pumpkin, corn crop, ready to be harvested,
last one of the year, capsicum,
it's a summer crop finishin'.
Last one of the year.
Potatoes, just been planted.
First crop of the winter, as a main crop
and we've got vetch cover crop,
if you're wonderin' what the green edges,
they're vetch cover crop comin' around the edge.
There's two rows of potatoes in each bed
with a compost furrow trench in between.
That's our way of growin' potatoes.
And, of course, the eternal sweet potato,
which we're always growin' it seems.
We're always plantin', always growin'.
We've got tomatoes and they're just finishin'
but we have endless sweet potato
'cos it will grow here all year.
So it's our main starch.
And then over the back here
we have a cassava garden.
It's just coming through.
Cassava's also a perineal here.
So we have our cassava, which is very hardy.
It'll grow right out of the weeds.
Another main crop.
We're really main cropping now.
It's very basic and it's very simple.
It's not complex at all.
Okay, we're here at the dairy
and this is one of our early morning activities,
well quite early anyway.
We've got the feed ready and the buckets
and one of our main dairy cows here, Daisy.
She's waiting, she's impatiently waiting.
Here she goes, bucket goin' in and
she's already feeding.
So she's getting her deal and we're going to now
get our lovely fresh milk.
Let's show you how it works.
We milk everyday and we get another product as well.
We get quite a lot of night manure,
which is useful round the farm.
Let me show you around.
So this is our milking station
and we've got a nice stepped dairy
so we can milk stood up and
Salah and Latifa are sharing the milking here
and there it goes into the bucket.
This is a manual milking
and we've only got one, one and a half cows really.
There's a young cow going to come in next.
So we won't bother with a small machine.
It's just as easy to hand milk.
We've all kinds of different feeds.
We give 'em different minerals and different mixes.
A little bit of molasses, stainless steel buckets.
Here's Daisy, she's gettin' breakfast.
She's used to this.
Can actually milk Daisy in the paddock if you want.
We used to.
Let's have a look at the,
there we go, in the bucket it goes.
Get your aim straight.
There we go.
[Salah] Let me empty it out.
This just goes, in case they kick the bucket.
We'll put it in the spare bucket.
We're always got a bit of extra there,
just in case we get a kick.
There's a little bit of oil,
a little bit of coconut oil we're using for
making the teats nice and
lubricated.
And this is a standard procedure
and it's good to have it organized.
Everythin' that's needed for the cows,
actually the horses as well.
So we got our saddles here.
We saddle up right here at the moment.
And our dairy calves, they get milk all day,
but they're locked off at night.
So the mums are bagged up,
because they haven't had any calves milkin' them
during the night time.
You can do it any way.
You can lock 'em off in the day,
or lock 'em off at night.
But you got to lock 'em off half the time
to get your milk.
So our calves get milk half the time
and we get the other half.
We get it after the night.
This is Bilbil, she's just got her first calf.
But we've also got lots of manure, see the manure.
We got manure all around the night yard.
They're very friendly.
They know us well.
No problem.
We get all this manure.
Everyday we get all that manure to take to the garden,
to take to the worm farm, to take to the compost.
So next to the dairy we have a long, thin paddock here
where we let the cows graze for about 30 minutes
after milking while we clean up, process the milk,
wash down the dairy and they bag up,
so this is called a bag up cell,
so they get extra milk in that 30 minutes,
and then we let the calves out.
30 to 40 minutes a cow will put on quite a lot of milk
from that bit of grazing
and then the calves immediately have their milk,
as soon as they come out.
So otherwise your dairy cow
won't give you the last liter of milk.
She'll save it for her calves.
They're creatures of habit.
They know you're going to give 'em that time to bag up.
So they'll give you all of their milk
knowing they're going to get that lovely bit of pasture
to bag up before the calves come out
all hungry for breakfast.
We're only getting a few liters.
What we gettin'?
Three four liters?
-Yeah. -Yeah.
Under the two,
most of it's comin' out of Daisy here.
It'll be a liter and a half out of Bilbil.
And that's our early mornin' milking.
This is one of my favorite trees on the farm
because it's just such a gorgeous shape
and I camped under this tree when I first arrived.
There was nothing here and this was my camp.
It's a ficus macrophylla planted over a hundred years ago
for shade for cattle.
It's an island of life.
The ficus fruits, they call 'em figs, common name,
but it's not a edible fig.
But the birds, the fig birds eat it all day
and the bats eat it all night
and the mice come a long and eat the fallen figs
and the owls come along and eat the mice,
so it's like an island of life.
It's got incredibly long branches right out.
It's quite special.
We've recently put a dam in, in the valley behind it,
below it, and it tails right back to the outside
root zone edge.
And we've called it Fig Tree Dam.
It was the last dam we built.
So now this tree, with its beautiful buttress,
I actually use the buttress as my cupboard, originally.
So I sort of stored things and put covers over 'em
in amongst the buttress.
I really had no resources originally.
But now we have water comin' up the valley
right behind it
and you can see the buttress is right here
and the outside drip line, lines up perfectly
to get extra water from here now.
This is the tail end.
Some of these trees are going to die off
because they're flooded.
But they're going to be great habitat
and our water goes right back into the forest there.
I'll go to the other end and we'll look back at it
'cos it's quite something.
So here we are, coming down on to the dam wall.
You can see the dribbler pipe there
and the water's right on the dribbler pipe.
So she's absolutely full capacity as a standard flow.
Emergency spillway in the foreground,
across the emergency spillway
and you can see from the dam wall,
looking back to the forest, a very young dam,
less than a year old.
It's about seven months old.
There, there you can see the canopy of the big fig
there above it, the way it towers back into the forest.
It's one of the lowest dams on the farm,
not quite the lowest,
but it's pretty much down there in the bottom.
It's pretty much a wildlife damn, great swimmin' dam.
Going to be a great fish dam,
we're going to stock it with a lot of fish.
But in emergencies we're going to be able to pump from here
to the higher dams.
Got lots of nice rocks positioned
that we'll be able to sit on and enjoy the view.
Yes and you will as well.
There's our small herd of beef cows there.
Well there you go.
Early morning Zaytuna Farm.
Great pleasure to share it with you.
We'll do a lot more Q and As, sharin' information,
'cos that's what we're about.
Okay.