Jonai Farms | Farm

Jonai Farms

Phone: +61 422 429 362

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25.01.2022 We have decided to pay the rent. We acknowledge that we are farming on the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung people, whose sovereignty over our area was never ceded, and extend our respect to elders past, present and emerging. We endeavour to care for this land with grace and respect for the many thousands of years of custodianship of the Original Owners before us. We think acknowledgement is important but insufficient restitution for the stolen lands of the Original Owners, and... so we have decided to also pay the rent. We now do so by paying 1% of our monthly income to https://paytherent.net.au/. This Pay the Rent initiative is based in and currently focussed on Victoria. Decisions about the distribution of Rent money is made exclusively by a Sovereign Body of First Nations people. That is, the money always and only belongs to Aboriginal people. We encourage other non-Indigenous Australians to pay the rent, whether through this means or more directly to local communities if possible. We will continue to search for more ways to offer our solidarity to the Dja Dja Wurrung and all Indigenous Peoples of Australia and around the globe. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

25.01.2022 Hello everyone! We’re open as usual with strict social distancing and hand sanitising for visitors, plus we sanitise all surfaces after your departure. I’m slicing some of this beautiful 36-month-aged jamón today, and will have enough for a few orders beyond our CSA members, so if you’re keen, either tell me here how much you want or DM me and I will make you up a pack of 100-250g. Tell me when you want to collect and if you’re after anything else (bacon, chorizo, apple & sage sausages, mince, or roasts...) and we’ll have a bag ready. All payments online as we are not accepting cash during the pandemic. Look forward to seeing some of you at a safe distance soon! x

23.01.2022 I wrote up my understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic, industrial agriculture's role in creating new diseases, the impacts on the Australian food system, and my optimism for a more connected future for everyone - a food sovereign future. If you follow our page, you obviously care about food systems, how animals are treated in agriculture, and good, nutritious, ecologically-sound produce. I've included a number of links to things you might like to read to get better informed a...bout what needs to change to stop more outbreaks from happening. Look after each other in these challenging times, and look to your local farmers for a more delicious and nourishing way forward. As I say in the post: Buckminster Fuller famously said that ‘You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.’ We have been building the new one (while also fighting the old one), and now we’re (mostly) ready. The old system is eating itself, the new one is going to feed you. http://www.tammijonas.com//covid-19-an-opportunity-for-di/

22.01.2022 As most of those who follow the Jonai journey know, we are a thriving CSA (community-supported agriculture), with a committed community of members (and suppliers, and fellow farmers, and comrades!) who have had our backs through some very challenging times here on the farm. In return, we've had their backs through periods of unemployment, illness, and uncertainty such as the current pandemic and lockdown (remember the army of sourdough starters last month? There are 40 new b...akers out there!) Next week, the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance is commencing a series of Solidarity Sessions, with a very exciting line up of people and organisations talking about the very real and important work they're doing on the ground to create and progress solidarity economies. We're starting with CSA - me, Ant from Tellurian Fruit Gardens, and Dan from Bellasato Farm, MC'd by our comrade Nick of Belvedere Farm - if you've been holding back on transitioning to CSA, we're here to help you make the best leap you'll ever make. AFSA members will be given an opportunity for a longer deep dive into the nuts and bolts of CSA in another session coming soon. I've chosen my last CSA blog post to highlight how wonderful it is to live in a solidarity economy (and because Fb downgrades ev3nt links). The link to sign up for next Wednesday's actual solidarity session is https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/afsa-solidarity-economy-ses - pass it on! Let's build the new normal we wish to see in the world! Viva! x http://jonaifarms.com.au//this-is-what-solidarity-looks-li

22.01.2022 Hey Queensland! We're bringing our popular Grow Your Ethics producers' workshop combined with a meat literacy afternoon to you up on our mate's Belvedere Farm on 1 July! We'll be up there for Deep Winter Agrarians, and looking forward to catching up with farmers and allies old and new!... Get your tickets now as they are limited to just 16! Let's talk all things radically transforming the food system from the ground up!! <3 http://jonaifarms.com.au//grow-your-ethics-eat-your-ethics

21.01.2022 The pandemic has starkly highlighted the fragility of the industrial food system - and the risks posed to those of us reliant on any part of that long value chain. Centralised processing facilities such as abattoirs have been sites of many clusters of virus transmission globally, leading to this week's announcement that they will be restricted to 2/3 capacity for the next six weeks in Victoria. We are very happy for the workers in those facilities that the government is taki...ng these and other steps to protect their health while keeping this essential service functioning. But at this stage we're unsure whether our abattoirs will fit us into that 2/3... we slaughtered three months' supply of beef before the restrictions in anticipation of reduced capacity or closures, but we didn't manage this with the pigs as our abattoir was closed last week due to cases of COVID, and now must operate at the diminished capacity. We are awaiting news of whether we will be able to slaughter in the next six weeks. You can hear our thoughts on the risks and need for radical transformation of the food system tonight on the ABC 7:30 Report. Sending strength and hope for better future for all as we work through such challenging times. And much solidarity to all our farmer comrades who are also working through loss of processing options - a problem that started long before the current pandemic.

20.01.2022 We were on The Project last night! If you want a closer look at how we do things at Jonai - representative of many more small-scale pastured livestock farms around the country that we're helping to make the new/old normal - check out last night's segment! And remember that you are what you eat, so eat ethically! ;-) <3 ... https://10play.com.au//meet-the-former-vege/tpv191201zurnt

20.01.2022 Hi everyone - we're back. We shut down this page for the past six weeks after attacks from vegan abolitionists, but now that Tammi (me) is back from working with the UN Convention on Biological Diversity on the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework in Rome, we have time to manage our page again. I'm posting this photo intentionally, intent-fully, mindfully. This is me doing what I do here on the farm. ... Stuart and I have spent our entire lives worrying about and trying to change the industrial food system, in particular in regards to the treatment of animals. In my case, it led to nearly a decade of vegetarianism. Careful consideration led me back to omnivorism and ultimately led us to the farm to contribute to the movement to grow and distribute food in ethical and ecologically-sound ways. We are not ashamed, embarrassed, nor defensive of what we do. We are proud to work hard every day raising animals in what we believe are are ethically-sound ways, and then killing them for food. We are working towards how to make the system even better with our plans to build an abattoir right here on the farm. As mentioned at the top of this post, I take my efforts beyond the farm to local, state, national, and international arenas, where I advocate for everyone's right to access nutritious, culturally-determined food produced and distributed in ethical and ecologically-sound ways. I even advocate for vegans' right to eschew animal products. If you still have issues with what we do because you have chosen a vegan lifestyle, move along, you're not welcome here. I've spent 30 years researching, listening, living, and thinking about the ethics of raising and eating animals and I simply have no more time for your abuse. We will delete and block offenders. And if you think this is 'censorship' or we're blocking your 'freedom of speech', go look those terms up, you muppets. You're free to say whatever you want and I'm free to delete it when it's on my page. Isn't freedom great? To the 99% of people here who are not vegan abolitionists, hi, it's lovely to see you again. You can expect regular updates from the farm again, from happy piggehs on the paddocks to contented cows chewing their cud, and to carcasses in the chiller, and apple and sage sausages in autumn. Nobody puts the Jonai in a corner. xo the Jonai

19.01.2022 The wonderful people who have helped / are helping Jonai Farms become what it is - a thriving community of people committed to a food and agriculture system that is ethical, and socially and ecologically just. In nine years we've had 38 interns, 4 WWOOFers, and over 100 farmers and others we've taught and learned from at Jonai, not including workshops. Thank you all for your support, love, laughs, and camaraderie over the years! Here's to many more! ... This is the first nine years of photos as at 30 August 2020. I'll keep adding to them! I'm missing photos of a few people because my computer ate two years' worth, so if you have any to add, please send them through! Dave Spatcher, Iest & Feebs, Will Hughes, Seb Vetter, Andrew Stone, Kat Dretzke, Lee Kosky, Tasha Shoo, Mara Ripani, Will Bennett, Jess McKenzie, Jacques, Jo & Harriet... And of course all the friends and family who may not have been in the boning room, but have helped in so many ways. xo

18.01.2022 Our final delivery to Melbourne for the year is this Thursday, and we have about a dozen lovely bone-in shoulder roasts for your holiday table still available... We also have fresh or smoked hocks, Toulouse and pork and fennel sausages, plenty of bacon, and some of our farmstead pancetta and 36-month aged jamón. We can drop special orders at our usual hubs in Footscray, Malvern, Clifton Hill and Northcote (details provided upon ordering) along with our regular CSA deliverie...s on Thursday, or you can collect directly from the farm gate. To order a special roast, sausages, bacon or others, jump on our website and order now! (These will be gone *very* fast as we have so few to offer.) http://jonaifarms.com.au/xmasroasts

17.01.2022 There's never been a better time for solidarity than right this minute. So we want to ask folks who are fans of Jonai Farms and our ilk to support some others doing it a bit tough with lost sales to restaurants, and sign up for some great CSAs here in Victoria or up in Queensland. Captains Creek Organic Wines is a beautiful family enterprise just on the other side of the volcano from us who have been affected by covid restrictions. With the restaurant closed and Melburnians ...unable to visit the cellar door, they're suffered a sharp drop in sales. So we thought we'd show some solidarity and let you know they're delivering and offering free freight at the moment. What more indulgent way to support your farmer than to drink his wine? :-) https://www.captainscreek.com/ Milking Yard Farm is another local who lost a lot of sales when restaurants closed. They're now taking new CSA members for their stunning Sommerlad chickens. We always say 'don't eat chicken unless it's name was Colin'* - well, Bruce grows some of the most ethical, ecologically-sound, and delicious chicken in Australia. I cannot recommend them highly enough. Tammi's comrade on the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance National Committee farmers Dan and Leanne at Bellasato Farm in FNQ have also just offered their first CSA shares - also beautiful Sommerlads on pasture, with their own on-farm abattoir! So if you're up that way, sign up now via their Facebook page! Angelica Organic Farm have opened subscriptions for their 2021 vegetable season as well. We've been members since they shifted from farmers' markets to CSA and love the variety and abundance of thoughtfully grown veg for eight months of the year. Jump on it as subscriptions close on the 3rd of September! https://www.angelicaorganicfarm.com.au/csa And here's a photo of Clarabel and Jeffrey ruminating on the northerly sky. Take care of each other, everyone. Together, we've got this. xo

16.01.2022 We sliced plenty of 35-month aged jamón in readiness for the weekend, hoping some delicious cures (also coppa & pancetta) would take your minds off the world’s current worries on these wintery days... also plenty of fresh pork and beef cuts in stock, plus pâté de tête, bone broths, and our lovely lard-based soap. So pay us a visit and stock up on some goodness. We have COVID protocol in place - only one family in the shop at a time, hand sanitiser available, and payment by ...direct deposit only - no cash, please. Open every day except Sunday 10am to 4pm. 129 Morgantis Rd Eganstown Stay safe and eat well. x

15.01.2022 15% off all meat in the freezer! We have heaps of beef mince and a solid selection of beef & pork cuts and smallgoods in the freezer that we're keen to move along before we commence the annual xmas cut in a fortnight (zoiks!). So we thought we'd offer it to all of you at 15% off from now until 14 November! Melbourne - we're excited for you that you're being set free this weekend, and hope many of you get to enjoy the fresh country air after your months of sacrifice for the b...enefit of everyone - thank you! Here's an unrelated photo of Clarabel the house cow in the lush spring grass at the bottom of the volcano. She's due to have a calf in the next week, so a visit to the farm gate could include a catch up with not only happy piggehs, but also a dear little baby calf if you're lucky. :-) Hope to see you soon (don't forget your masks!). First in best fed a the farm gate! 129 Morgantis Rd Eganstown 10am to 4pm every day except Sunday

15.01.2022 Anyone who follows us knows how committed we are to raising animals well, and to transforming the food system to make what we do the norm. Well now there is a 7-minute mini-documentary in conversation with Tammi that covers all the points of what we don't like about industrial livestock production, and what we do here at Jonai. We're so grateful to have this little capture of the farm and our philosophies, thanks to Demand Film for making it, and for your camaraderie and ef...forts to promote ethical and ecologically-sound food, and now to establishing DemandFarm to get good food to more people. And remember, you are what you eat, so eat ethically! https://vimeo.com/423027392

11.01.2022 We would love to see more ethical omnivores or those working towards it at this Wednesday's Melbourne premiere of Natalie Portman's film Eating Animals! It's a fantastic film that shows the worst of industrial livestock production without concluding that the only solution is to go vegan - it strongly promotes the work of small-scale pastured livestock farming. I (Tammi) am the Australian spokesperson for the film, and there's a pretty wonderful 7-minute short film of me at ...Jonai Farms talking about the ethics of raising and eating animals that will be aired at each screening around the country. If you don't see a screening on offer near you - request one from Demand Films through their website! Take all your friends! This is a really important film, and one very very dear to our hearts. https://tickets.demand.film/event/9039

09.01.2022 We Jonai have always considered the personal political, and the political personal (especially Tammi). Now Stuart is stepping up and standing for Hepburn Shire Council in Creswick Ward! In keeping with our values and practices of radical transparency, Stuart is committed to transparent and genuinely consultative representation - he's here to listen, not to direct. ... And he's running alongside a number of other local independents who have all agreed to the charter for participatory democracy developed by CommunityVoice. You should go check out and like all their pages, and be sure to vote for democratic renewal in Hepburn Shire! Stuart Jonas For Hepburn Shire - Creswick Ward

07.01.2022 These are the eight remaining cattle from the herd of 23 we left on the ground as we traveled overseas to spend time with family. We'll write about the story in full soon, but in short, while we were away the cattle were mistakenly given access to a paddock that had a bulka bag of peanuts intended for pig feed. Most suffered acute acidosis, and we lost 13, with two taken to the abattoir to be salvaged for the meat at least. It's a crisis of many lives lost and tens of thousa...nds of dollars with them. Heartbreaking. In the past seven days, our community swung into action and helped us physically, logistically, and emotionally through an extraordinary amount of work (we were coming home to butcher 12 pigs for a double delivery after our trip anyway, and added three home kills for our own consumption to avoid more sad waste - this meat is not legal for sale). Seven straight days of cutting while trying to wrap our heads around a different vision for 2020 than we anticipated. Our beautiful CSA members have offered everything from foregoing beef while maintaining their payments, to paying as much as five years up front so we can buy more cattle, to sharing our workshops with their friends and family to get more cash in our account to afford to replace the cattle. Not to mention the messages of love and support that have brought me to tears more times than I can count. We are humbled and deeply appreciative of all of you - once again showing the power and importance of solidarity economies and how farmers can be supported by our communities through thick and thin. We still have grieving and planning to do, but this evening after finishing deliveries I'm just grateful. Grateful for Stuart and his unwavering work ethic and partnership in good times and bad, for the community of our family, fellow farmers, friends, and members who have our back in so many ways, and grateful for our health, delicious shared meals, and last night's rain. Thinking of other farmers doing it tougher than us - everyone should send some big love to the farmers you know right now. This too shall pass, together we've got this. <3

05.01.2022 Grab a beer & have a listen to Tammi talking all things raising and eating animals, including some thoughts on a vegan v regeneratively farmed omnivorous diet! https://soundcloud.com/meattheultimatepod/ep-48-tammi-jonas

05.01.2022 We were on the ABC 7:30 Report last week talking about abattoir restrictions and the need to de-centralise processing to reduce risks to our food system. We really need to revive rural and regional areas with infrastructure that makes us more resilient in the face of shocks like the current pandemic.

04.01.2022 Hello friends! A quick update from all of us here at Jonai Farms as we continue farming and butchering in these challenging times. We hope this finds you all out there looking after yourselves and each other, and that if you need support you're getting it. If you're local to us, and in serious financial stress, and a bit of meat might help you through another week, DM us and I'll see what we can do to ensure you're fed! Now to our update - the farm gate shop is open as usual... (Mon-Sat, 10-4), and we have plenty of good meat in stock. We have COVID Procedures in place. You'll find hand sanitiser for your use upon entering and leaving the shop, which can have no more than one visitor inside at a time. We are not accepting cash, only direct deposit as we have always accepted. We will keep physical distance from visitors while maintaining a friendly social cohesion. :-) When visitors leave, we sanitise all surfaces. Second, we lost our waste-stream feed supply yesterday as both our major suppliers have shut down production effective immediately. This means we have no real choice but to buy in commodity pellets (GM and antibiotic free) to get through for however long non-essential services are in lockdown. While this presents us with some financial hardship, we are very fortunate to be an essential service in a solidarity economy (our CSA), and feel for others in far worse positions than ours in this crisis. Finally, we don't know when it will be considered safe to host our workshops again, and so are working on a plan to deliver some content online both in informational short videos and in livestreaming interactive workshops where appropriate, followed by long lunches on the farm when it's once again safe to do so. Some workshops simply won't suit an online interaction, and these will be postponed to a later date. Where those who have already purchased workshops do not wish to or cannot participate in these alternatives, we will offer refunds, but we hope people understand the impact this will have on us, and that you will bear with us through these troubling times. And here is a photo of a beautiful sculpture made by one of our current clever interns Josh Williams on the equinox here in the Jonai lockdown, suitably titled 'Balance'. We hope it's inspiration for more ways to fill your days in lockdown with creative pursuits in addition to growing and preserving more of your own food if you can! Remember to stay home and stay safe, everyone! With hugs and solidarity, Tammi, Stuart, and team Jonai xo

04.01.2022 La Matanza - the annual killing of the pig This weekend we celebrated the life and death of Lilith, a breeding sow no longer fertile, with a traditional la matanza here on the farm. Dear friends consisting of fellow farmers and former and current Jonai interns and staff came together to work as a community to slaughter and process Lilith over two days, ultimately creating 100kg of salami. ... It started Saturday morning. Stuart walked calmly into the paddock where Lilith was laying, said 'thank you' and 'sorry', and killed her with a clean shot to the head. She never knew what was coming and she was instantly dead. I caught the blood, her life for ours, whisking rapidly to keep it from coagulating in order to make morcilla (Spanish blood sausage). She was at least a 200kg carcass, almost too big for the tub, making scalding and de-hairing quite the challenge, but we got there. We harvested all her organs, enjoying heart, spleen, and liver over lunch on Saturday, lungs on Sunday, intestines meticulously cleaned for salami casings used Sunday. Her head and front trotters and hocks were roasted and then made into an unctuous ramen broth, her fat rendered to make fresh ramen noodles - Saturday night's dinner. Offcuts were slowly rendered in la caldera for an afternoon snack. The final process is the making of the morcilla, a rhythm I especially love as la matanza starts with the collecting of the blood and finishes by transforming it into delicious, nourishing sausages. While we had hoped to enjoy this with our CSA members this year, COVID has put that on hold until next year. But we are grateful for the less than 20 of us able to come together to work with joy and respect for the life we took, and the feasts and conviviality we enjoyed so much. <3

03.01.2022 Thank you to everyone out there supporting farmers directly, and to all the farmers for your blessed toil & dogged determination to grow the world you wish to leave for those who come after us. And a special message of solidarity to those doing it toughest in drought & fires - we hope you’re getting all the community support possible to get through such difficult times & we’re thinking of you constantly. Merry Christmas/Hanukkah/Solstice/Festivus from all of us at Jonai Far...ms! We look forward to another year ahead feeding many of you uncommonly delicious produce grown & distributed in ethical & ecologically sound ways.