ECOLOGICALLY-friendly approaches to agriculture have a new champion, The Mulloon Institute, a not-for-profit organisation endowed by businessman and farmer Tony Coote.
The Institute will provide an “open-air university” for the teaching of “natural farming” practices, ranging from organic and biodynamic techniques, to permaculture and Natural Sequence Farming.
Mr Coote hopes the Insitute will train the “farming leaders of the future” who can run farming systems that are robust and resilient, and are not dependent on long supply chains for their survival.
“I think natural methods of farming offer us some hope,” he said. “Conventional farmers are willing to use the techniques of natural farming, so long as they are given the tools to do it. No-one wants to poison things, and there are different ways of doing things.”
Part of the Institute’s endowment will be the two biodynamic farms, totalling 2330 hectares, that Mr Coote owns in the Great Dividing Range east of Canberra.
The farms currently run an organically-certified beef herd of 400 breeders, and 12,000 hens in a free range biodynamic egg production system.
Mr Coote created the institute out of his firm belief that agriculture needs to learn “how food and farming fit into nature, not the other way around”.
A successful businessman, the “Coote” in the Angus & Coote jewellery chain, he has farmed since the late 1960s.
The Mulloon Institute is the latest outcome of a long journey into ecologically-based agricultural practices that began with the disastrous 1982 drought.
Mr Coote adopted biodynamics at the time for purely pragmatic reasons, after visiting a biodynamic farmer who was staying on top of the drought with far lower costs than his conventional neighbours.
He has since developed a unique free range egg production system, in which every 1000 hens are progressively grazed across 20 hectares from a mobile roosting and laying house.
The activity of the hens has put the land on a continuous cycle of improvement, while the production of 50,000 premium-priced eggs a week still falls short of demand.
Eggs and beef are marketed under the Mulloon Creek Natural Farms brand through outlets like Harris Farm markets.
As well as biodynamics, Mr Coote has initiated several research projects on the farms.
The Natural Sequence Farming techniques taught by Peter Andrews, particularly the “chain of ponds” principle, has been used along the central waterway, Mulloon Creek, with the results monitored by a team from Australian National University.
ANU is also monitoring some controlled grazing trials.
A long permaculture swale designed to store sub-soil moisture in the landscape has been built, and Matt Kilby’s Trees for Earth operation has undertaken substantial tree plantings.
These activities, and an attitude of self-reliance that has the farms’ own small community growing and consuming its own vegetables, milk, meat and eggs, will shape the research and education program planned by The Mulloon Institute.
The Institute is being run by Danny O’Brien, former business operations manager with Hewlett Packard’s Australian software division, and his partner Sue Ogilvy.
Its charter is to be:
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