Kay and Dave Tommerup’s dairy farm located in Queensland’s Kerr Valley has been named one of the 18 recipients of the Australian Farmer of the Year Awards, as well as being named a finalist in the awards’ Innovation category.
The 80-hectare dairy farm turned away from mass production and large-scale supply chains. Instead, all its milk and cream are processed within a micro, on-farm creamery. There is also no wastage on the farm, and the animals are rotated around the farm to have a positive impact on the land.
“The focus of everything we do and every experience we offer, is our dairy, our farm, and our desire to build a farm business that can be taken on by our children, and their children on this beautiful property that’s been farmed by Dave’s family since 1874,” Kay Tommerup, who also sits on the Boards of eastAUSmilk and the Queensland Farmers Federation, said.
The dairy farm has been around for six generations but it was hit hard by the dairy deregulation in 2000. The couple took control of the farm six years later with the farm at a rock-bottom financial state. In order to augment the farm’s revenues, Kay and Dave opened the farm in 2006 for camping, animal feeding tours, and school excursions.
“Our journey into agritourism came as a survival tactic for the farm,” Kay explained. “With three generations living on the family property, and Dave and I having just started our own family, dairy deregulation in 2000 came at us like a freight train. The dairy should have closed – the numbers told us so. But numbers can’t beat passion, or respect for family and tradition.”
Their diversification into agritourism helped the farm get back on its feet and scale up. Soon, the farm was able to produce its own line of boutique dairy products in 2019 and left its longtime milk processor partner Norco in 2021 to pursue its own path as a dairy product processor itself.
“We’ve gone from a dairy farm being propped up by tourism dollars, to a dairy farm leveraging the benefits of agritourism to add higher value to our farm product and now we have a legacy for future generations,” Kay said.
“It’s really important that we encourage other farmers who might be thinking, ‘we can’t keep doing this’, that we let them know there are other ways to do it,” Kay added. “When a higher value is placed on products coming from farmers choosing a regenerative journey, it allows more resources to be allocated to those regenerative practices and helps us to continue down that path.”
“There are so many family traditions linked to everything I do,” Dave said. “Leaving Norco was a difficult decision, but it was the right one. Most farmers are highly innovative, they have to be to survive. It’s a matter of whether they have the financial resources, knowledge and confidence to get where they want to be.”
Explaining that agritourism is farm diversification, farmers using their resources and skills to build resilience in the face of a changing landscape, Kay says that agritourism isn’t a change of use, rather a change of mindset.
“It’s a change in the way we promote and value our industry, our farm product and produce, and it’s time it was recognised that way,” she said.
