My Aim

My Great Opportunity

The Kelly family of Holland’s Track Farm, Newdegate have generously offered me access to their pastures at no charge in return for the benefits well managed livestock will bring to their soils. To get started I've been taking care of other people's cattle for a weekly fee. I use temporary fencing to keep moving the cattle every couple of days so the pastures can recover after grazing rather than being chewed while the plants are drawing on root reserves to replace the leaves that were recently eaten. This should improve pasture growth and the pastures ability to capture nutrients, rainfall and sunlight.

Who Am I?

My name is Tom Golding, I’m 32 years old and I've been working in the wheatbelt of Western Australia for a little over ten years. I enjoy growing all sorts of things and finding out better ways to do so. Despite growing up in the Northern Territory, cattle are a fairly new thing for me so I spent last year saving up and gathering experience working and volunteering on different cattle stations in the north. My farming methods are influenced by parents biological mango farm,  Low Stress Stock Handling techniques, Allan Savory's Holistic Management, the work of the Henggler family on Kachana station in the Kimberley, Joel Salatin's Polyface farm and of coarse the Kelly family.

115 Heifers I took care of earlier this year 

90 cows currently on Hollands Track Farm 

Lyndon Station October 2016

Kachana Station February 2016

Kachana Station July 2016

Your support will be used to kickstart my yard building program by allowing me to buy a cattle crush (pictured below) valued at $5000 so we can safely handle cattle allowing us to provide a better service and take better care of the cows. A cattle crush is needed virtually every time we need to handle cattle, for separating them, pregnancy testing, marking them. With a crush cattle can stay on Hollands Track Farm longer without having to be sent away for drafting, pregnancy testing, etc and will improve my ability to generate an income throughout the year and will let the cattle do their thing for longer.

The main challenges I have are that I'm starting from scratch and the are large capital expenses if I were to use normal,  existing farming methods. This seems to be a major reason young people are reluctant to join the industry and why I'm using low cost, flexible fencing and making use of crowdfunding and other innovative ways to help get started.