Information and Articles

If there is one thing a small farm owner can count on during a high-risk fire day, it’s that your local rural fire brigade probably won’t arrive in time to control a fire on your property. They are likely to be busy fighting fires elsewhere, as fire-fighting resources are often allocated to places where there is the greatest risk to life on high-risk fire days. 

This can be a difficult fact to take on board for some new landholders, especially those living close to our larger regional towns and cities who are used to services being nearby and instantly available. 

Undoubtedly you’ve heard about new quad bike rollover protection regulations which have come in. Agriculture and forestry use quad bikes, sometimes called an ATV, as they are a useful tool for many farming jobs.

Quad bikes are designed for an operator who straddles the bike. There are 3 categories of quad bikes:

We had the pleasure of speaking to our 2nd prize winner and recipient of the COX 27T log splitter, to learn more about her inspiring small farm journey.

Watch small Aussie farmer, Liz Beavis, catch a swarm of bees on her hobby farm.

Your property, your rules. So how do others know what the rules are? Sure, you can go through this with every person setting foot on your farm. Or you could set up some policies and procedures and maybe an induction or two, to make life a lot easier both now and in the future. This is also a simple way to let others know what you expect from them.

Hobby farmer Fadi from NSW won the first prize in our competition celebrating the launch of Farmstyle Insurance earlier in 2022.

Here, we share Fadi’s story of becoming a small farmer and his thoughts on managing the risks on his small farm.

Fadi is an IT professional from Sydney, who bought a 26-acre hobby farm in Tallong, in the Southern Tablelands of NSW, in partnership with his brother two years ago.

When you run a small farm in Australia, you need to be prepared for increasingly regular severe weather events due to the La Nina and El Nino weather patterns.

Severe weather events such as floods and storms (during La Nina years) and drought and bushfires (during El Nino years) are risks that have become a certainty in Australia.

Farmers and small businesses in rural and regional areas are urged to be cautious, particularly when buying heavy machinery, following a spike in scams targeting the agricultural sector this year.

When I was a kid, all my relatives grew their own vegetables - my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles. But I was never interested in any kind of gardening (and I didn’t particularly like to eat vegetables anyway). Things have changed a lot since then! 

Greater Sydney Local Land Services has launched a series of online resources to support small farmers during self-isolation.

The Big Shift for Small Farms podcast and “From the Ground Up – marketing fundamentals”
video series include a broad range of expert advice and information for growers and producers
running a variety of business from industry experts and their farming peers.