Goodies Farm Visit - So Good!
This week, two thirds of Wide Open Agriculture’s Impact Team (Craig and I!) hit the road to visit Dale and Penny Goodwin of Goodies farm, down in Kendenup. Goodies are one of our fantastic flour suppliers, and all round good humans. It was wonderful to finally meet them in person!
We came down to discuss one of our exciting pilot projects in the pipeline - an aggregated carbon farming project that Wide Open Agriculture are working through with farmers across the Dirty Clean Food and Friends of Dirty Clean Food supply chain. Stay tuned for more news on this project as it unfolds.
For those of you who haven’t come across them before, Dale and Penny are passionate regenerative farmers who have been farming in Kendenup in the Great Southern after moving their lives and livelihoods from the family farm in Dalwallinu. They officially moved to Kendenup 8 years ago, and farmed in both Dalwallinu and Kendenup at the same time for 5 years, before finally moving to Kendenup full time in 2019.
Since they have moved to Kendenup, they have embraced biological regenerative farming with an emphasis on soil health, where they focus on creating nutrient-dense, chemical residue-free produce for their local community in the Great Southern region. This is their fourth year growing this way and their second year using no artificial inputs.
Dale and Penny grow a range of crops in Kendenup, with multi species crops and multi species hay being somewhat of their speciality, and Penny’s passion. They sell their multi species hay as nutrient dense animal feed, and their pea straw is fantastic as mulch for your garden. Their multi species grain mix also makes great chook feed, both in grain form and also as a fodder mix - this is what I grow for my chicken pasture! They grow triticale and wheat, and have partnered with scrumptious Albany bakery BredCo to mill it into their very own flour. This flour has become my favourite for sourdough bread making, as my starter seems to just love it - it is much more bubbly and active when fed with goodie’s farm flour! If you love baking and haven’t tried it yet, check out our range of Goodie’s flour here on our website.
They also grow oats, barley (they are contemplating milling oat and barley flour), rye (which they grow with vetch and daikon radish to open up heavy clay soils), lupins, field peas and are trialling chickpeas this year too! What a fantastic combination.
Dale and Penny also run sheep on their property, and have been learning about the benefits of holistic managed grazing through a holistic management course recently with Brian Wehlburg from Inside Outside Management.
Sheep provide a bit of a logistical challenge for single wire electric fencing, which is what most farmers use when they are moving large mobs of sheep regularly across the farm - cattle are much more likely to respect the fence and stay within the boundary, whereas sheep tend to forge ahead straight through!
A huge thanks to Dale and Penny for welcoming us onto the farm (and for the frittata, yummo) looking forward to working with you both into the future.
