Willow Grove family has a Zen way with free-range hens
From solar-powered chook caravans to a super-efficient coolroom, this Gippsland family uses some innovative practices to streamline their free-range egg operation.
CAR manufacturing and free-range egg production may seem worlds apart.
For Kumi and Kelvin Slade, however, the reliability and efficiency that underpin the auto industry are the same principles that make their small, sustainable Willow-Zen Free Range Eggs operation a success.
“We are really pedantic about being reliable and consistent, which is really tough for small operators,” says Kelvin, who worked for Toyota with Kumi before the couple turned their hands to farming.
“There are a lot of farms that really try to do what we are doing. The biggest challenge for everyone is appearing like you are a really big, reliable organisation while still being sustainable, small and adaptive.”
Kumi and Kelvin founded the open pasture free-range egg business at Willow Grove, north of Trafalgar, in 2014, starting with 400 hens and one mobile caravan.
Scaling up over two years, the couple designed all their infrastructure and systems with efficiency in mind.
They now run 3500 hens, housed in five caravans that accommodate 700 birds each. The flocks are shifted weekly to new pasture across their 25 hectares, allowing the hens to graze and scratch for seeds, bugs and grubs, while providing natural fertiliser to improve soil and pasture.
Casual staff help with the most labour-intensive jobs, including daily egg collection, grading and packing, but much of the seven-day-a-week work is still carried out by Kumi and Kelvin, with a little help from their three sons, Manan, 9, Dhiira, 12, and Kafil, 13.
“We had worked every day for nine months,” Kelvin says, remembering the first year of the business, when they finally decided to bring on one employee to help.
“On average, now we have about five (staff). They are pretty much all mums.
“We are very flexible to people choosing hours and everyone working together. We find that mums, women in general, are so resourceful and reliable.”
OPEN PASTURE FREE-RANGE EGGS
KELVIN and Kumi call the operation “open pasture” farming to differentiate their approach from larger scale producers, which can run up to 10,000 hens per hectare and still label eggs free-range.
“So you can have eggs in the supermarket that are $3.50 a dozen sitting on the shelf saying free range, and ours sitting there for $9 to $12, saying free range and people say, ‘Why would I pay more money?’,” Kelvin says. “The biggest challenge is having people understand the difference between open pasture and what free range has now become.”
For the couple, a good measure of their production system’s merit is the continual improvement of their land and the health and daily life of their birds.
Hens are free to roam during daylight every day, guarded by a team of Maremmas and a couple of alpacas.
The Slades don’t cut spring pasture for hay – “because there are no cattle here”, Kumi explains. Instead, mulching grass to create humus protects soil from sun and erosion.
“In a well-maintained area, that grass really comes back,” Kelvin says. “The soil and humus just keep getting better and better every year.”
EFFICIENT FARMING
WHILE Willow-Zen looks similar to many small-scale pastured operations, the Slade family’s impressive point of difference is efficiency, which is now paying dividends across the business.
Kelvin says people usually baulk at the word, imagining it means cutting costs, and replacing people with robots.
But true efficiency, he explains, is none of the above. “It is taking out things that people don’t want or need,” he says.
At Willow-Zen, it starts at the front gate.
An automated keypad entry saves valuable time every day, as does the farm’s unique paddock gates that open vertically with a drive-over mechanism.
The thoughtfully designed silo is just the right height to easily fill a chook feeder loaded on a trailer.
The family even collaborated with Aussie Feeders to finetune design of the chook caravans. A manual hand crank was upgraded to a hydraulic automatic levelling device operated by a remote. Solar powered motors run the timed nest box excluders and egg collection conveyor.
“Efficiency is about understanding that it might take a little longer in the beginning,” Kelvin says. “But if you get that soil right it maintains itself.
“If you buy a tractor that is appropriately sized and you buy gates you can go through in seconds, rather than minutes, these things cost more in the beginning but save time over their entire operational life.
“Once each efficient system is in place, you don’t have to think about it every time. That problem has been solved. Move on to the next one.”
The lessons in efficiency came from Kelvin and Kumi’s former off-farm life working for Toyota in Australia and Samoa, where they were impressed by the company’s focus on preserving value with less work, now famously dubbed a “lean” production system.
LEAN PROCESS DESIGN
KUMI is the brains behind some of the clever on-farm design.
An IT expert who shares a love of languages with Kelvin, Kumi was born in Japan and grew up in a rural town in Okayama province, northeast of Hiroshima.
“My parents had a little acreage on which we only did vegies,” she says. “And we always ate from my parents’ garden.”
She met Kelvin in Beijing, where they were both studying Mandarin. When they moved back to Melbourne, Kumi wanted to offer her children the experiences she cherished from childhood – a rural lifestyle and fresh food directly from the garden.
“We looked for land for about two years, and saw 60-something different properties,” she says. High-rainfall Willow Grove, north of Trafalgar, suited them perfectly and they bought in 2006.
Kumi and Kelvin spent eight years designing and building everything on the farm, including a packing shed and cool room that sports 500mm-thick straw bale walls, which requires just a tiny amount of power to keep eggs at the ideal temperature.
“We literally spent every single cent we had and borrowed heaps more to get us to a point of infrastructure so we could do what we wanted to do,” Kelvin says.
Kumi designed their energy-efficient house, while Kelvin invested in a massive 250,000-litre rainwater tank coupled to large-diameter hoses for fast water transfer.
FARMERS’ MARKET GROWTH
Birds are bought in at point of lay – about 16 weeks – and stay on farm for about 12 months. Each hen produces an average nine eggs every 10 days. Running at full capacity, that equates to 1.15 million eggs a year – or more than 95,000 dozens.
While cracking into farmers’ markets was not easy in the beginning, due to waiting lists, markets now make up about 25 per cent of sales, with the rest an even split between cafes, restaurants and retailers.
“The beginning is the hardest – you don’t have any customers, nobody knows who you are, the bank won’t talk to you, and the farmers’ markets don’t let you in,” Kelvin says, with a laugh.
But their reliability paid off, with market operators returning their loyalty.
“We have done an average of two markets every weekend without missing one for seven years,” Kelvin says.
Kumi explains farmers’ markets are also an enjoyable part of the weekly routine.
“We build our friendships with regular customers and catch up with what they have been doing. It is a good way to get off the farm. It is a real community,” she says.
Perhaps the most important measure of their success is their sons’ opinions of the business.
“When we were eating dinner recently, I asked them what was the most valuable thing they owned,” Kumi says.
“The oldest one, he is 13, said ‘the farm’.
“He said we know where the food comes from, and especially here how the eggs have been produced. They learn life skills, driving, how to use tools. I thought, ‘Woah, I wasn’t expecting that answer’.”
For Kelvin, the real judge of their efforts will be whoever farms their land next.
“We believe, as a farmer you are a custodian of the land,” he says. “I’ll be dead within 100 years, then this farm will be someone else’s property. And I should leave it better than I found it. Hopefully they will too.”
FARM FILE: WILLOW-ZEN FREE RANGE EGGS
Kumi and Kelvin Slade run 3500 open pasture free-range hens on 25 hectares at Willow Grove, with help from their sons, Dhiira, 12, Manan, 9, and Kafil, 13. They grade eggs by size and sell through farmers’ markets, retailers, to restaurants and cafes. Eggs retail for $9-$12 a dozen. Where: Willow Grove, Gippsland
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