We talk farming with Field to Feast

Field to Feast is an organic farm located in Catherine Field, just outside of Sydney. Owners Cath and Hapi tell us more about the trials and tribulations of life on a farm including what is in season, the challenges they face and why they do what they do.What is Field to Feast?From the first day, our aim was to grow quality produce whether for our immediate family or the general public.  We’ve always had a love of vegies and cooking and Hapi has always had a great love for farming.  With vegies too, they often take a back seat to the more glamorous farm produce like fruit, meat and dairy.  The feast part really is about showcasing vegetables and helping them take centre stage on our plates.  If we all ate more veg, the population at large would be much healthier!What do you produce on your farm?We grow upwards of 120 varieties throughout the year.  If it is a green, is leafy, a herb, has a root, is a vegie, or a fruit, then we either grow it now, or have grown it in the past.  We spend a fair bit of time looking for what may be interesting each year.  Then I get to spend a lot of delicious time pouring through glossy mags and websites to guess food trends so we can be prepared for the coming years.  Hapi also likes working with the less popular vegies to grow to see if he can find a way to grow them on our farm, or for longer times through the year.  Our chickpeas are a perfect example of this.Who accesses/ uses your produce?We market ourselves in many ways, which is part of our business insurance policy.  One level is to organic retailers.  Then we market to restaurants and cafes that are interested in sustainability, organics, local produce or great taste.  We’ve found restaurants and cafes come in many different shapes and sizes and throughout Sydney their needs vary according to their local demographic.  Our last marketing outlet is through Farmers Markets.  This is a tricky area as there is a lot of work attending the markets and people don’t realise that the cost to do one day is enormous. At the moment we only do Bondi Farmers Market as we have a great group of customers there that buy our produce.  If Hapi and I had more time and more hands we’d love to do more.What is in season at the moment?Winter is a great time for our farm.  All the beautiful leafy greens flourish with the frost and cold weather.  From dandelion to kale, silverbeet to fennel, we have a range of over 40 items now for sale.How long has Field to Feast been operating for?We started back in 2007.How did you get involved in organic farming?When my second daughter was born she had a serious allergy to lactose.  Over the next few years it became apparent that even being surrounded by washing powders at the supermarket was enough to make her sick.  She was intolerant to chemicals and had a host of food allergies to boot.  At this time I was finally diagnosed as a coeliac, and after changing my diet, realised that for all my life I’d been sick and modern living wasn’t helping me or my children.  That’s going back a long time now.  Zoom forward to when we started to farm.  I was adamant that no chemicals should be used.  Hapi though was a traditional farmer with the mindset that a farm should be weed free, look beautiful and picture perfect.  He judged his ways on old school values.  Over time though we did courses and learnt new ways of farming and started adapting them to our farm.  Hapi is a very creative, clever farmer, and once he realised there was a new way he could work, he started to develop new methods that work beautifully for our property.  We now work in tune with nature rather than against it and can see the difference.What have been the biggest challenges running organic farm? We practice organic agriculture in it’s truest form but one challenge we face is that the term ‘organic’ has been hijacked by a certifying body that charges money to tell farmers they are doing the right thing.  We know we are doing the right thing.  At the other end of the spectrum we have the major supermarkets educating customers to buy perfectly formed, perfectly shaped and uniformly sized fruit and veg which just doesn’t fit with organics.  We spend a lot of time explaining to customers that holes are their guarantee that food is organic and that some plants don’t grow as fast as others.One of the nice things we have learnt though is that every year we will be presented with difficulties and each year these difficulties will be different.  As much as we prepare something else will come along.  Through this pattern we have learnt to roll with the punches each season and make the best of what we have.  If life gives you lemons, then work out fast how to make lemonade!What does a usual day look like?Ha!  There is no usual day!  Having learnt to farm in Tonga, Hapi learnt how to get the best out of people.  He knows that there is no point in doing too much of any one thing on any given day, so he varies each day based around tasks at hand.  It’s a farm.  There’s always picking, weeding, planting, packing and planning to do.What has been your favourite moment on the farm? What do you love about your job?The ‘duck salad bar moment’ was our favourite, hands down.  Hapi had accidentally over ordered lettuce seedlings so we would be planting 5000 lettuces for the coming weeks.  That is what you would call a shit-ton of lettuce!  I spent weeks thinking up marketing strategies and working out how we could sell all this lettuce.  I was ready!But just as my plans were formulated the ducks discovered our lettuce beds and had eaten their way through the whole crop!  The beds nearest the pond are now known as the duck salad bar.Through this though, Hapi learnt what the ducks will eat, what they won’t, what the rabbits eat and what they won’t and so on, and has since developed a planting plan to stop the animals in their tracks without having to stop the wildlife living in and around the farm.  That is what we love...we get to live with animals and nature and don’t have to resort to killing anything to make a living.Do you have a favourite vegetable? Can you talk us through how you grow it?Ohhhhhhhhh, they are all our favourites, just like our kids!  It’s August now though which is the tail end of the year, so it would have to be the various flowering shoots.  Not only do we grow broccoli and rape, but we also pick and bunch the stems from tatsoi and kale to sell and use in the same way.  But then again we had rainbow chard and cauliflower in our mash last night which was beautiful.  Or the watermelon radish cooked up with corn the other night... Do I have to choose?What major challenges have you faced in the years you have been farming in Sydney? I hear you are planning on selling your farm?The biggest challenge we had was when our farm became an island in April, 2012. Catherine Field gets rain in spits and spats.  Leading up to the flooding in around April 2012 we had constant rain from November.  We lost almost everything that April so as good farmers do, we packed up and went to Vietnam for a holiday to learn about organic farming over there.  When we came back the ground was dry enough to start again.  That was the year we proved that a major incident such as a flood will only put us out of business for about six weeks.  It was tough, hard, and at times tear worthy, but we made it through and managed to stay afloat.And yes, we are planning on selling our farming business.  Neither of us are getting younger, and Hapi has always expressed the wish to live in Tonga for his retirement years.  We have family there too, and as a third world country we feel we may have learnt enough here now to be able to take some knowledge and expertise to the island and help our family and friends build better lives.  After building Field to Feast up over these past 6-7 years we would love to find the right people prepared to take up the opportunity and work with us as they transition to a great business.  We are still working the farm as normal and plan to hand over to whoever is interested with a solid set up to give the new owners an opportunity to take organic farming to the next level.  Ideally we’d love to have some young people come on board so we could be part of the trend of bringing a fresh, new, young face to Australian farming.  That is what this country desperately needs and it would be a lovely way to step out of Field to Feast and into new pastures.