“We’re a seasonal dairy,” says Kate Field of Leap Farm and Tongola Cheese, on Tasmania’s east coast. “We only milk for nine months a year. So, we start every year in spring, and we start kidding [our Swiss Toggenburg goats] in late September, and most of it’s done by mid-October,” she says of the Tasmanian farm on which they produce both award winning cheese and meat.

“I suppose the whole ethos behind what we do is wanting to create the best produce we can, the most nutritious and healthy produce,” says Iain Field. The couple previously lived in Sydney before taking the leap to farming life. “Two young professionals, we went shopping at farmers markets, but we didn’t really know where our food came from,” he says.

“We wanted the best food we could. I was an academic, an ecologist, and I had all this info in my head of how to do things in a healthy way for both humans and the environment, and animals. Long story short, we moved to Tassie, we bought a farm.”

Tongola produces “fresh cheeses to be eaten fresh,” says Iain Field. “I don’t add a lot of salt to give them shelf life, we make them fresh. We suggest how people eat them best within the timeframe that they have. You know, some people like it mild, some people like it stronger [and more ripened]. We educate our customers, our friends, to eat the produce the way they want it.” 

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The Fields buck many a convention within the farming sector, Iain passionate about shorter supply chains adding more value to farmers, and Kate explaining that they manage their animals with what could be said to be lower stress: kids are left with their mothers, who are milked just once a day (not twice), and male goats are grown for up to 12 months for meat. Often in more industrial operations they would be killed, seen as waste and more work. The practice of disbudding – removing or stopping the horns from growing – is also something you won’t find at Leap Farm. Kate Field believes that it’s an unnecessary step, and that a goat having its horns has a physiological benefit for the animal; in cooling and keeping warm. 

Business growth and greater profit aren’t the main driver at Leap Farm. The Fields want to do what’s right for the land and themselves; an approach that’s paying dividends of a different kind. Verified as carbon positive by the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture, Kate Field says, “across this tiny little farm – it’s only 108 hectares – after we’ve offset our own emissions, we’ve actually offset the emissions of 60 average Australian households per annum.”

Currently they milk about 80 goats which is up from 18 when they started 8 years ago, a closed herd that they’re “growing quite organically, not trying to be the answer to everyone’s everything, just doing what we’re doing,” says Kate Field. Far from being concerned about competition, Ian Field says that they’d much rather see another seven or eight farms doing what Tongola is doing than grow to the equivalent size. 

“We want to be economically and financially sustainable,” he says. “But what we want to be more than anything is an exemplar to other people in this space of how you can do it by being environmentally sustainable, ensure the health and happiness of your animals and produce a really good quality product.”

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