Mike and Lauren met while cooking as chefs in some of London’s best kitchens. They were both drawn to careers in cooking out of a love for food, nutrition, and flavor. In a quest to create the most delicious, most nutritious plate of food, Lauren and Mike quickly found themselves searching for answers in places beyond the wholesalers and markets. They found themselves standing in fields, talking directly with farmers…about soil. They fell in love.
When given the opportunity to move home to Australia and farm on some family land in Tasmania, Lauren jumped at the chance. Mike soon followed.
To support themselves while learning the art of farming on the side, Mike and Lauren took jobs cooking in Tasmania. Soon, due to their connections in restaurants and their incredible vegetables, Mike and Lauren had contracts and customers for their farm—and they were able to farm full time.
“We knew what chefs wanted,” says Mike of their curated selection and pristine presentation of produce. “There can’t be mud in the kitchen.”
As Felds Farm grew and their reputation for creating high-quality vegetables while rehabilitating land spread, Mike and Lauren were invited to take on another leased property two-and-a-half hours to the south. This larger piece of land allowed Mike and Lauren to scale production beyond market gardening and start producing several crops at scale.
Lauren and Michael have been farming both leased properties for three years and are ready to own their own land.
Regenerative & Sustainable Practices
Lauren and Mike are former chefs driven to produce the most flavorful, most nutritious plate of food possible. The best way to do that, they’ve found, is to grow food from healthy, active soil within an abundant and diverse ecosystem. They employ the following practices to make sure their farm ecosystem is producing the highest-quality produce available.
Low-till & no-till cultivation
No synthetic fertilizers
No synthetic pesticides, herbicides, insecticides ever
Crop rotation
Cover cropping
Animal Integration
Non-certified organic management
Pollinator habitat protection & creation
Sliding-scale CSA price model to not limit access to nutrition
