Educating People About Nature
The High Valley Dawn journey began when a passion for permaculture and regenerative community building collided with a desire to produce fresh, local, organically grown produce for our nearby family restaurant Beaches Rosslyn Bay. Several years ago, the intention to one day create a self-sustaining community that would inspire future generations to get back to working in harmony with Mother Nature was set and in 2016, the universe delivered this magnificent 140-acre seaside allotment into our possession.
Fast forward to today and High Valley Dawn has become a platform for showcasing a range of regenerative farming techniques and off grid sustainable features that has already touched the lives of thousands, teaching the Permaculture ethics of earth care, people care and fair share.
We have studied in the field of Subtle Energies and have worked respectfully from day one with the ancestral and nature spirits of the land.
Our vision statement is to create:
“An ever-evolving, self-sustaining community model, nurturing love and joy in harmony with Mother Nature for the greater good of all”.
We started by establishing our water systems, working within the principles of Natural Sequence Farming, and creating a series of 4 dams that run along the valley floor. The water is solar pumped to storage tanks 28 metres high allowing the power of gravity to service our animal systems and automatically irrigate our market garden and food forest. We also put in a series of swales and leaky weirs to prevent runoff and retain water on the property. Later, we further drought-proofed the property by adding a fifth dam, serviced by a solar powered bore after the brackish water has been filtered through a natural desalination plant/biofilter.
Once our water was secure, tens of thousands of man hours have been put into establishing our market garden and food forest where we practice permaculture principles and host hundreds of species of edible plants. The use of pioneer species, composting, rotational resting, no-dig farming, ‘chop and drop’ mulching and many other techniques has built soil quality and structure over time to the point that we are now producing year-round. We are now in the process of establishing with guidance from our Darumbal Elders, a bush tucker section that will be dedicated to Australian native indigenous foods and medicinal plants. The remainder of the property is now divided into paddocks and uses time-controlled, rotational grazing to systematically move around a growing herd of livestock.
Other sustainable features of the property include our powerless underground cold-room, our volunteer house, and classrooms (which have all been upcycled from old buildings), our aircrete dome and an adobe pizza oven. The whole property is 100% off grid and is self-sufficient in terms of energy, water, and food.
The farm plays host to weekly family tours, educational permaculture events as well as tours by many kindergartens, schools, home schooling, university groups and national bus tour groups. We are now in the process of gaining approvals to establish an education centre and eco cabins on site so that more people can come and learn and experience off-grid sustainable self-sufficient living.
The people care ethic is enormously important to us. We host wellness retreats, journey to manhood/womanhood programs, work with a number of assisted learning schools, youth justice groups, young people experiencing disadvantage, indigenous schools and elders and rehabilitation organisations like NA and AA. Many mental health sufferers have found their feet again by living and working on our farm. We have also had over 240 volunteers from all over the planet come and work and learn about permaculture on our off grid, sustainable self-sufficient farm.
Our desire is for High Valley Dawn to serve as a catalyst in leading much needed positive change by creating a model which is replicable and illustrates that small-scale, regenerative agriculture mixed with education and agritourism can be profitable in its own right. It can also have positive flow-on effects and social impact within our local community which ripple all around our planet. We love what we do.