Tammi Jonas

Do you try to choose free-range pork, but struggle to find free-range smallgoods? Well, we’re here to help, but we’ll need your help first!

We’re Tammi, Stuart, Oscar, Antigone, & Atticus Jonas, aka the Jonai of Jonai Farms & Meatsmiths. We raise pastured rare-breed Large Black pigs and Lowline cattle on 69 acres of lush volcanic soils at Eganstown, just outside of Daylesford, Victoria.


Last year we were the first farmers in Australia to crowdfund infrastructure for agriculture right here on Pozible, where you helped us raise $27,570 to build our very own retail butcher’s shop on the farm. We’ve been selling meat butchered by us since obtaining our Primesafe licence on 21 January 2014, and we’ve delivered on our uncommonly delicious rewards as promised!

On-farm butchery has given us full control over the quality, reliability, and finances of our supply chain, and it’s allowed us to respond individually to our community’s desires. It’s meant we can ensure all our products are preservative and nitrate free, and enabled us to develop a line of ‘single-estate sausages’ made entirely from things grown here on the farm, including all our own herbs and garlic.


Over these last two years we’ve also done quite a bit of experimenting with different curing traditions, and we’re now ready for the next stage – our own licensed curing room and commercial kitchen so that we can sell you true artisanal smallgoods made entirely from the highest quality, ethically-raised meat. Is it really artisanal if you don’t start with happy animals?

For over a year now we’ve been running workshops to teach others how to butcher, make sausages, and cure a range of delicious products including salami, prosciutto, coppa, lonza, lardo, guanciale, and pancetta, as well as simple brined and smoked products like bacon, ham and pastrami.


More recently we’ve introduced a range of French charcuterie to our repertoire after the wonderful Kate Hill and the Chapolards came all the way from Gascony to run a French farmstead charcuterie workshop here at Jonai Farms & Meatsmiths. They taught us how to make ventrèche (rolled, air-dried belly), jarret farci (stuffed hock), pâté de tête (head cheese), and the delectable fricandeaux – which we call ‘frickingood’. They also introduced us to noix de jambon (literally ‘nut of ham’) for a delicious and relatively quick turnaround on an air-dried single muscle ham.


We’re ready now to build on the tasty success of our experiments and start curing at a commercial level, so that you can enjoy the incredible flavour of smallgoods cured from genuine free-range pork and know that we’ve looked after your salami from paddock to plate.

On-farm processing is the future of small, ethical farms like ours. Our friend and colleague Lauren Mathers up on the Murray at Bundarra Berkshires is running her own campaign to build a curing room and commercial kitchen, and others across Australia are wresting control of the supply chain back from the obscurity of Big Food, helping you have confidence in where your food comes from while we all build viable farms in a perverse system that has seen farmers leaving the land in droves for decades.

Your support helps us reach our goals to be ethically viable without taking on debt from the banks to line shareholders’ pockets.

Instead of feeding the banks, let us feed you with our range of tasty rewards in return for your pledge to help us reach our goal!

We’re founding members of Fair Food Farmers United (FFFU), a branch of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA). A driving motivator for Jonai Farms is to do our part to make food fair again – fair to soil, plants, animals, water, air, workers and eaters everywhere.

For us and other farmers to do that, it will take plenty of community support, by choosing to buy from your local farmers – at farmgates, online, at farmers’ markets, or through the growing number of hubs connecting eaters and growers – and also by supporting crowdfunding efforts like these ones. This is what Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) looks like!

You have not known salami until you’ve had it from a true farmstead meatsmith. We’d love to be one of what we hope will be many more farmers to provide eaters everywhere with the unbeatable flavours of ethically-raised, artisanally-made salami and charcuterie.

Viva la revoluciÓn deliciosa!

A note on rewards

In order to produce basic air-cured meats such as prosciutto or the more complicated fermented meats like salami, we need a temperature- and humidity-controlled curing room that will be licensed by PrimeSafe. To produce a range of cooked charcuterie such as pâté de tête and rillette, we need a commercial kitchen. The commercial kitchen will also aid us in catering for our monthly events right here on the farm.

Our plan is very similar to the one we had last year – convert a 40’ refrigerated container (a ‘reefer’) into part curing room, part commercial kitchen, which will be connected to the existing retail butcher’s shop.


The PrimeSafe licence requires a high level of monitoring and reporting for cured and fermented meats, including a strict auditing and testing regime, which will increase our overheads significantly. We are prepared for the increase in costs, and have worked out our budget to allow for this increase and the delay in product for sale as it takes time to cure.

Our target is $30,000. As per the budget below, we’re prepared to fund the remaining $5,560, though it would be incredibly helpful to raise that money during this campaign and pay you back in uncommonly delicious ethical pork over the six months ahead! As per last year’s campaign, we haven’t budgeted for labour as Stuart has the skills to do the entire conversion himself.


Budget

40' Reefer $5,000.00
Delivery $500.00
Footings $160.00
Rust treatment $100.00
Floor level $500.00
Floor epoxy $1,000.00
Drains $200.00
Doors + internal walls $1,000.00
Electrical + Lighting $4,000.00
Chiller/heater/fan/water $5,000.00
Hanging trolleys $2,000.00
Sink $1,000.00
Stainless steel benches $2,000.00
Oven $5,000.00
Extractor fan $1,500.00
Kitchen shelves $800.00
Fermentation chamber $1,500.00
Windows $800.00
Incidentals $2,000.00
Handwashing sink $500.00
Licence & initial audit & testing $1,000.00
TOTAL $35,560.00

The greatest obstacle is meeting our regulatory responsibilities, which not only require a high-quality building and fit out, but an expensive regular testing regime. We've already demonstrated our capacity to meet the regulatory requirements with our butcher's shop, and we have built the increase in costs associated with regulation into our business plan. 

The other obstacle is ensuring we have a consistent supply of our regular fresh pork while we start hanging smallgoods to cure, without too great an adverse effect on our cash flow. Again, we have built this adjustment in our supply into our financial planning for the year ahead, and hope to use this campaign to raise funds to be repaid in product rather than taking on the added burden of a bank loan and associated interest fees.