The Green Pastures Story

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The Davis, Whiting, Van Donk and McGlade families from southwestern Victoria form The Green Pastures Movement. We’re multi-generation farming families with a firm commitment to creating healthy products, healthy farming practices and a healthy business that we can pass on to the next generation.

In an industry known for pricing challenges and ownership by huge multinationals, we are aiming to revolutionise the way the Australian Dairy Industry, if not the world, produces milk. Over the past five years we’ve taken risks and challenged convention, all for a desire to provide Australian families with a healthier milk made on healthier farms.

By taking matters into our own hands, we’ve launched our own brand of milk, distributed though Coles supermarkets, other independents and selected cafes. We’re also looking to ensure both environmental and financial sustainability for our own family farms while being a positive role model for the Australian dairy industry

HOW WE FARM

The Green Pastures farming methodology is based around using the waste on our farms to create healthy compost, which we use as a rich, organic, sustainable fertiliser to replace chemical or synthetic fertilisers. And by mapping and managing nutrient movements around the farm we can continue to improve the soil and reduce the carbon footprint on each farm. This helps wake the soil up and bring it back to life to its healthy, natural state. And it works!
A dairy farm needs grass. Cows eat it and make milk from it. So simple! And yet the science and methods behind our grass, our soil and our fertiliser are anything but. Traditional dairy farms use chemical fertiliser, and over time they put more and more on to make the grass grow. What this actually does is damage the soil, reducing the amount of nutrients, minerals and carbon, and therefore what the grass can draw on to grow.

OUR COWS

Without dairy cows, you don’t have a dairy and you can’t have a healthy dairy, producing healthy milk without healthy cows. Therefore, our animals are our most important asset, which is why we take care of them to the highest possible standard. Every Green Pastures farm has a strict Charter of Responsibility that we adhere to.
All our cows are free range. They’re not kept in a free stall, tie barn or a feedlot-housed environment. Our cows roam free, with pasture under their hoofs and the sky over their heads. We don’t dock our cow’s tails. We let nature determine a calving schedule. We don’t induce for our convenience. We don’t use mass feeding of antibiotics. Each cow is treated on a case-by-case basis, under the strict supervision of a Vet. A Green Pastures cow on antibiotics is taken out of the milking herd and only reintroduced when the antibiotics are out of the cow’s system. All our cows are inspected at least once, every day. And the use of hormones is strictly forbidden.

THE BEST OF ORGANIC AND BIODYNAMIC

Our farming methodologies take us back to how our grandparents farmed. While we’re not completely ‘organic’ or ‘biodynamic’, we do apply many of these principles in our farming, and combine them with so-called ‘modern’ farming techniques to create a sustainable, responsible farming methodology that produces great outcomes for the farm, the animals and the consumer.
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