No holds barred at Chippin Estate
No chemicals. No outside soil. No worries. This is the approach taken by Chippin Estate’s Shane O’Keefe at his bountiful vegetable farm.
You only get out what you put in.
It’s a theology that surmises to a tee the efforts of South Gippsland producer, Shane O’Keefe, who has spent the past 25 years feeding not only his reputation as a quality producer, but a fruitful, bountiful patch of land that feeds the community in which he lives.
Shane, who owns and runs Chippin Estate at Woolamai, south-east of Melbourne, not only grows high-quality horticultural produce, but he grows his own soil too.
There are zero inputs from off-farm at Chippin Estate: a 2ha market garden producing fruit and vegetables such as beans, rhubarb, potatoes, pumpkins and salad greens at Woolamai, southeast of Melbourne.
The zero-input approach is taken literally – all soil is made on farm, along with mulch and compost, on-farm water from a dam, and no external labour.
It’s an approach to farming that Shane said is motivated by growing up next door to his grandfather’s sprawling market garden, where he learned via osmosis how to care for and tend to a productive vegetable farm.
A BLANK SLATE
Purchasing the Woolamai property in June 2000, Shane established Chippin Estate predominantly as a garlic farm, at its peak sowing 20,000 bulbs at a time, with a number of raised garden beds and fruit trees for household consumption.
“We started growing just asparagus, rhubarb, food just for us, that’s all I pictured for us,” he said.
“My love for growing fruit and vegetables started from an early age, living next door to my grandfather. I probably annoyed the hell out of him after school, just being a sponge and absorbing as much information as I can.”
“I started out selling produce wholesale to a few organic shops, and had chefs come out. My idea when I first started was for chefs to come and pick directly. It didn’t happen as much as I thought it would.
“Since Covid, people are a bit more interested in where food comes from, those low food miles, no spray, and seasonal. We’re purely seasonal here. I don’t have a grow house and I don’t want one.”
In the ensuing two decades since establishing the farm, he has cultivated two varieties of garlic on his property – Woolamai Purple, and Glen Forbes Pink.
“It’s a bugbear of mine … the garlic industry not standing up on their own two feet enough, and saying this is Australian garlic,” Shane said.
“I have varieties my father grew for 20-odd years in Mornington, and I’ve been growing it for close to 25 years. It’s an Australian garlic.”
The garlic crop has been scaled back in recent years, from 20,000 bulbs sown to about 12,000, which gives Shane time and space to dedicate to tending to other varieties, in keeping with his client’s demands.
The total growing area is expanded bed-by-bed each year, with Shane’s varietal choices influenced by his customers’ palates and their burgeoning interest in seasonality.
About 100 fruit trees are scattered across the property, yielding stones fruits such as apricots.
Garlic is sown “as traditional as possible”, around mid-May until June 22, “as close to the winter solstice”.
The bulbs are then harvested and dried in the lead-up to the longest day of the year, with the aim to have dried braids of garlic ready to sell before Christmas.
“The rhubarb I grow is a descendant of my grandfather’s. You keep dividing the crowns, so I now have a couple of hundred plants that I keep dividing. I have a few other seeds from my grandfather, some heirloom varieties,” he said.
A BALANCING ACT
What Shane saves in terms of input costs such as chemicals and infrastructure, he then deploys as energy and time spent producing his crops in the most sympathetic manner with the land.
“I mulch heavily, I’m constantly composting, I try to get everything mostly on the farm,” he said.
“I’ve never brought in soil. I make all my own soil, I compost and I compost, and I make my own liquid fertiliser.”
A steer, raised on-farm to fill the family freezer, will be killed annually with the offal and bones processed and turned into blood and bone for the productive gardens.
Vegetable varieties change depending on what the season is doing, consumer demand, and what crops were previously in the soil.
If you pay attention to weather, wind, and what you’ve previously grown, Shane said the soil will do much of the work for you.
“Just by planting at the right time, the balance is better,” he said.
“You’re in a microclimate, which each year gets stronger and stronger by working with nature. There are a few basic tricks, like having a great crop rotation, and planting winter vegetables earlier so they can get established.
“I’m always about 18 months in advance when it comes to my crop rotation.”
A bed dedicated this season to soyabeans, on the request of a customer, will fix nitrogen into the soil, which will then be used to feed a more intensive crop the following year.
Zucchinis can dodge issues such as white mildew, a problem that often plagues vegetable patches in the region, with clever planting techniques, such as pegging all the zucchini plants, and by growing beans up on a trellis in the face of the prevailing wind to shelter the zucchini crops.
Average rainfall for the Woolamai region sits just shy of 940mm annually, with a dam on property capitalising on the high-rainfall for the area.
Water is directly irrigated by hand each day, a task Shane said he can accomplish because he doesn’t spend time on chemical application.
Irrigating by hand, he said, also allowed him to target water application to certain crops during certain times of the year, instead of a blanket approach to the whole growing area.
Shane will also carefully save seeds from the strongest fruits and vegetables from each crop when harvesting, which will be used next season to build resilience and quality into the crops.
GROWING THE FUTURE
The outbreak of the pandemic changed the landscape for many farmers, but in the case of Chippin Estate it was a change in a positive direction.
“When Covid came, people started contacting me, asking if I could leave veggie boxes at the gate. It’s kicked on from there,” Shane said.
“I often didn’t speak to the end consumer, and I’ve really loved being able to do that. It makes me want to broaden what I grow … to have more of a range than what I’d sell to wholesalers.”
Delivering between 10 to 30 vegetable boxes for customers across the district is a revenue source on top of the dozen local wholesalers, stores, and restaurants he caters to, from Cowes on Phillip Island to Loch.
His produce has also recently been included in a Bass Coast-produced dumpling product, made and delivered across the region using all-local meat and vegetables.
Plans for the future include the gradual and controlled expansion of the growing area, with an additional half acre of land recently acquired to accommodate a farm gate store for customers to source direct from the farm.
Shane is also considering construction of a tiny house on the property, to capitalise on the eco tourism movement but also to potentially house on-farmer workers as the site expands.
“People who are like-minded are gravitating towards this,” he said.
“Bass Coast and South Gippsland is almost one of the last regions to cotton on to what is such a beautiful food bowl.”
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