Crack at egg pasta pays off for Garsed, Righetti families

Two farming families have created one enterprise and have now launched their own pasta.

Shared commitment: Neigbouring farmers Ian Garsed (left) and Paul Righetti run poultry and cattle on their properties and produce their own pasta brand, Honest Eggs. Picture: Yuri Kouzmin

AN egg is an egg, but what do you do with the ones too big or too small for traditional egg cartons?

Make pasta — that’s what.

Surplus product — over and undersized eggs — from a joint farming venture in central Victoria, is driving its diversification beyond livestock trading and egg production into making, marketing and selling egg pasta.

Neighbouring landholders and cricketing mates Ian Garsed, 40, and Paul Righetti, 50, who farm in the Yandoit, Newstead and Campbelltown areas between Daylesford and Maryborough, launched their pasta last August, under their brand Honest Eggs.

The idea to turn their eggs into pasta came from an industry mentor who’d seen a small farming family in Italy do the same.

Discovering a semi-retired pasta maker and industrial sized pasta making equipment sitting unused in the nearby town of Daylesford, really kicked it along.

For producers, what’s interesting about this story is how two fourth- generation farmers, raised on conventional farms, have reconfigured their farming businesses in the 21st Century to deliver profits that enable them and their families to stay on their land and live in the area their great grandfathers settled in, an area where “lifestyle” buyers are driving land prices beyond what conventional farming can deliver a return on. (Lifestyle land has sold recently for $10,000- $12,000/hectare.)

They “layer” complementary enterprises, boosting returns per hectare, that is, they run chooks to fertilise soils to grow the grass for cattle and sheep and produce eggs to make into pasta, aiming for gross margins of 35 per cent across all enterprises.

Livestock contributes 30 per cent of revenue, pasta 5 per cent and eggs 65 per cent of revenue.

PASTA BLASTERS

FIRST a bit about the pasta.

“It was a concept we found interesting,” said Paul who spent 10 years off farm, when younger, working for a stock feed company and then a veterinary firm in Melbourne before returning home when his parents wanted to semi-retire.

He and his wife, Jacqui, had turned to commercial egg production on their land in 2014 and as egg production increased so did the numbers of eggs that were not standard retail sizes.

“Pasta was a product we could make using those eggs.

“We wanted to eliminate wastage wherever possible.

“Finding productive use for quality product was consistent with that business aim,” Paul said.

“Plus, pasta potentially offered better margins than eggs and out-sized eggs sold in bulk to the restaurant trade.”

With a stroke of luck he and Ian, who now farm together through their joint company, discovered retired pasta maker Rob Stella living in Daylesford.

They bought the required equipment and set about testing recipes and sharing samples before settling on their current product, Honest Eggs pasta, available as fettuccine, linguine, spaghetti and lasagne sheets.

It’s sailing on to shelves of retailers across Victoria and throughout Melbourne on the back of the Honest Eggs brand.

Or as Ian says, ‘we’re not claiming to be fifth generation makers of pasta using Nonna’s recipe. We are using our quality egg brand to sell the pasta.”

It’s made using Bellata Gold 100 per cent durum semolina flour and their own eggs.

The quality and amount of eggs in the pasta is a point of difference, said Ian, with the red/orange yolks, a consequence of a good diet, lending the pasta its rich colour.

LOCAL YOKELS

THE pasta is made in Daylesford — production varies from 250-500kg/week — and has been packed and distributed from there until recently. Now the company has opened a distribution centre in Melbourne.

Demand in regional areas hit record highs post-Christmas.

Producing pasta was definitely not high on their agenda when the two farmers decided to join forces in 2015.

“Paul and I first started hanging around together playing cricket at Newstead,” said Ian, who left school at 16 to work on his parents’ farm, then worked in Melbourne for three years before returning.

“We’d talk about farming. Paul was doing courses through an accountancy/consulting firm called Pro-Advice.

“They offered a good network of like-minded farmers and ran educational courses on sustainable farming with a focus on grazing.

That got me interested.

“We started talking about that and also about trading livestock as opposed to self-replacing breeding.

“These were concepts that weren’t traditional in our area where farmers usually ran self-replacing Merino flocks.”

It was clear both were interested in trying to do things differently and to build returns.

And that both wanted to stay on the land their great-grandfathers had farmed.

MORE FROM LESS

ADDING chooks meant being able to farm with fewer inputs, improve the soil, capture carbon, and return a profit while being able to graze animals.

“Ultimately what led us towards layering our enterprises (running chooks, producing eggs and trading livestock) was not being satisfied with the returns from our conventional family farms,” Ian said.

“It wasn’t about scaling up by buying extra land.

“We wanted to find out how we could make more from the same bit of land, what else we could do with it that sustained us and the land.”

“We’re both very attached to the area and that’s important. It drives a lot of our decisions.”

“We are heavily involved in the local community,” Paul adds.

“We have young children and want to be involved in their local schooling and sports so staying in the area partly drove our decision to diversify more.”

There was talk of a joint venture, forming a company and leasing their land to this company.

“We could see the efficiencies gained by having one entity rather than two and by sharing administration, labour management, vehicles and other overheads.

So in 2015 Paul and Jacqui and Ian and his wife Kim formed The Real Food Farming Company, appointing all four as directors and Pro-Advice’s Managing Director Clinton Peake as chairman.

Today its workforce totals 19 people working in part and full-time or casual roles.

“We run about 2023ha in total of mixed land tenures,” Ian said.

“Some is owned by my family, some by Paul’s family and the rest is owned by three or four other land owners.

“Our company doesn’t own any land. It leases all the land whether it’s from us or other land owners.”

Most of it in their local Yandoit/Newstead/Clydesdale area varies from heavy volcanic soils (with an annual average rainfall of 609mm) to lighter sedimentary soils.

The company has defied the area’s current tendency towards broadacre cropping, instead focusing on building healthy soils and grass for feed.

It does this by running chooks in roaming roosts moved around on pastures grazed by sheep and cattle which they buy in, fatten up and resell in the livestock trade market.

Cereals and other pastures are sown directly into existing perennial pastures to build up feed and increase biodiversity.

 

CHOICE CHOOKS

There are 20,000 pest-­eating, soil fertilising chooks all up, run at 30/ha and supplied from Murray Bridge at point of lay at 16 weeks of age.

Not all are owned by the Righetti-Garsed company.

Two families near Hamilton the Menzels at Branxholme and the Kissels at Bochara, are contract suppliers.

Settling into running their joint farming company took time he and Paul acknowledge but has had many benefits.

As well as cost efficiencies, it offers a place for shared learning, flexibility of work as their children grow, means there are more skills to draw on and their roles are clearly defined, meaning each doesn’t try to do everything.

Currently Paul works full time in the business overseeing the poultry farming and livestock operations while Ian works two days a week as overseer of packing and distribution and in administration.

It means they have time for their families while Kim Garsed works in her own career full time and Jacqui Righetti works in hers three days a week.

It also works because the men are equally passionate about farming, are not afraid to speak up and are open to new ideas and ways of doing things.

“We take on each other’s ideas,” Ian said.

“Mine and Paul’s relationship is key. If we didn’t get along it wouldn’t work and over time we have identified our strengths and weaknesses in each other and in ourselves. I definitely can’t bowl.”

MORE

AUSTRALIA’S BEST FARMERS FOR 2020 NAMED

NUFFIELD SCHOLAR STRIVES FOR CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

LEAGUE OFFICIALS WEIGH IN ON THE FUTURE OF COUNTRY FOOTY IN 2021