The story behind our amazing beef
When calving time approaches, our cows are checked at 5.30am, midday, at 5pm and again at 10pm. If we need to render assistance with a calving we do, but in the vast majority of cases the calves are born naturally in their paddocks.
The first 24 hours are very important for a calf, which needs a good feed of its mother's colostrum. Colostrum contains important antibodies which protect the calf from disease. While some farmers intervene in this process, we leave it to nature and the success rate is excellent.
After about three weeks the calves will begin to eat grass from the paddocks and hay and silage when they want to. They remain with their mother and drink from her right through to processing. The cattle pictured here, for processing today, fed from their mothers until yesterday.
Sometimes seasonal conditions can make it very difficult to grow beef cattle to the standard our customers deserve.
If necessary, we can now supplement their feed with a specially designed pellet that meets pasture-fed certification guidelines. These animals didn't require it and reached our target 420kg weight on their mother's milk, pasture and fodder alone.
These cattle were separated from their mothers late yesterday and travelled less than 2km to our on-farm boutique abattoir at Koallah Farm. They spent last night together in a large soft floor pen. Cattle that spend nights on concrete can become stressed and get quite sore hooves and legs which can impact meat tenderness.
They were handled respectfully and processed by our own staff in our accredited facility at 6am this morning. The carcasses will be aged for about 10 days before being butchered for online orders and our shops in Mt Waverley and Rosanna.
Incidentally, their mothers are already about seven months pregnant with their next calf. They now dry off naturally and have two months to put all their energy into the health of their new calf before it is born and the process starts again.
So that's what we mean when we talk about pasture fed, free range beef. To us it means no antibiotics, no added hormones and plenty of wide open space where nature can take its course. 
Have you tasted real chicken?
More and more consumers are quite rightly starting to question the term 'free range chicken'.
Rather than venting how many producers fall well short of meeting customers' expectations, we thought we'd just let you know what the term means to us at our farm.
The team at Koallah Farm is now growing our own meat birds on our property near Camperdown in south-west Victoria.
All our poultry live in our paddocks - protected from predators by Saydi our trusted Maremma (pictured below). The chickens can do whatever they want, all the time. We don't even lock them up at night time.
This means our chickens are genuine 'pasture-raised' chickens as they can eat grass and roots and forage for bugs, worms, larvae and more. They also benefit from lots of natural sunlight.
Although we still provide a feed pellet for additional nutrition, the natural proteins and minerals from our rich volcanic paddocks are essential in growing healthy, fully-feathered chickens with thicker skins and darker, stronger-flavoured meat.
It takes us a full 12 weeks to grow our chickens and it's worth the wait. As you can see, they develop quite differently with much more muscle in the legs from roaming around.
There's no doubting you can taste the difference. Pastured chicken is much less watery, not quite as soft and has a distinctly earthier and more gamey flavour.
If you cook it a bit slower you'll release all the natural flavour and we think you'll love it.
Keep an eye on the website for more Koallah Farm-listed chicken products. At the moment, we've started with whole birds, but very soon we'll be able to provide all your favourite cuts as well.