When Nick Ritar packed up his family and moved from Melbourne to a farm near Mudgee in NSW three years ago, he thought he was going to build a cottage, have a vegetable garden, and maybe run a few sheep while having a quiet, country life. So far, though, it hasn’t quite worked out like that.
On arrival at his family’s 1000-acre farm, it became plain that many of the paddocks seemed to be in poor shape. “We knew it had been over-grazed by the previous owners 10 years back. What I didn’t realise was how long these relatively fragile soils were taking to recover” said Nick. To remedy this, they set about finding solutions to regenerating the soils and other property resources.
Nick and his wife Kirsten Bradley, began to look for short courses that would allow them to gain more skills in pasture management and recovery, soil building and landscape hydration techniques. Surprisingly, they found this more difficult than they expected.
Typically determined and innovative, Nick and Kirsten decided to start inviting experts to the property and run the courses they wanted to attend themselves, using the family woolshed as a venue. The first course in water harvesting earthworks was so successful they decided to set up a business, Milkwood Permaculture, and haven’t looked back since.
“We now have a constant flow of the most amazing practitioners coming from all over the world – I mean, we’re talking world-leaders in sustainable and regenerative agriculture… in our family woolshed!” Nick explains.
After starting out offering water harvesting and permaculture workshops, Milkwood Permaculture now offers courses in sustainable grazing, compost tea and biofertilizers, keyline farming and permaculture design. Teacher highlights for this year include Joel Salatin from Polyface Farms in the USA. Joel is one of Americas most celebrated pioneers of chemical-free farming and an outspoken advocate for better, more natural food production techniques and practices.
“This sort of knowledge is such valuable information for all Australian farmers” enthuses Nick. “We all know we need to regenerate Australia’s farming soils, profits and communities – and here we have expert farmers from all over, showing us how”. Most of Milkwood Permaculture’s courses are FarmReady approved, making them reimbursable for farmers, land managers and primary producers.
