The Jonai (aka Tammi, Stuart, Oscar, Antigone & Atticus Jonas) tired of choosing between saving the world or savouring it, so figured out a way to do both.

In May 2011, we left our rather farm-like suburban Melbourne environs behind, took a shortcut across America to glean wisdom from a range of ethical farmers, and landed some months later on Dja Dja Wurrung country at what would become Jonai Farms, 69 acres at Eganstown, just outside the beautiful town of Daylesford, to raise happy, tasty, heritage-breed Large Black pigs on pasture.

Jonai Farms enacts food sovereignty, which asserts everyone's right to culturally appropriate, nutritious and delicious food grown in ecologically-sound and ethical ways, and our right to collectively determine our own food and agriculture systems.

We are a resilient, diverse family farm that focuses on living a life in common with nature, and managing animals for optimum soil health as multiple species are rotated around the farm to grow fertility and diversity on the paddocks.

Passionate about agroecology, we've weaned ourselves off commodity grain for the pigs, creating a net ecological benefit by diverting organic waste from landfill, and exiting the agro-industrial model of segregating feed production from livestock farming, with the added benefit of reduced feed costs.

After being the first farm in Australia to crowdfund major infrastructure in 2013 to build a licensed butcher’s shop on the farm, we succeeded again in 2014 and built a licensed curing room and commercial kitchen to make farmstead cured meats and a range of charcuterie, as well as bone stocks and lard-based soap, to ultimately deliver a full nose to tail no-waste offering. ‘Waste’ from the boning room includes bones after pate and bone broth making, which are then pyrolised into bonechar and used as fertiliser for our small commercial crop of garlic, taking us from 'paddock to plate' to 'paddock to paddock'.

Water is moved around the property by old piston pumps powered by secondhand solar panels via treadmill motors salvaged from the local tip, as the farm strives to reduce its dependency on fossil fuels.

We host regular workshops in ‘The Belvedere’, a purpose built shed made mostly of windows and entirely of secondhand materials, where we teach butchery, meat literacy, and how to run a small-scale degrowth agroecological farm, as well as the ancient traditions of transforming an entire pig into a year’s worth of cured goods such as salami, coppa, pancetta, and jamón.

In 2021, we installed a 15kW solar system and battery, moving us even closer to ending our reliance on fossil fuels. We have been striving for years to ensure carbon neutrality, and our ultimate ambition is to be a drawdown farm, demonstrating how an agroecosystem with livestock and abundant biodiversity at the genetic, species and ecosystem levels can express a healthy carbon cycle.

The farm embraces degrowth as a philosophy to ensure sufficiency for all, and is embedded in many circular and solidarity economies in the connected and deeply localised community, including our thriving community-supported agriculture (CSA) membership model. We value conviviality and mindful appreciation of the fruits of our labour, stopping to enjoy three meals together each day.

A famous philosopher once said that those who control the means of production control the world – it’s time the people wrest that control back into the hands of local communities and farms like Jonai!

Agroecology Beacon: rent-free Landsharing with Tumpinyeri Growers

Jonai Farms and Tumpinyeri Growers have a landsharing agreement on Dja Dja Wurrung Country (djandak) to share land, resources, labour, and community to run our respective and integrated small-scale enterprises raising pastured pigs and cattle, and fruit and vegetables. We value relationships over transactions, and reflect on our relationships with djandak to help guide our relationships with each other, other farmers and suppliers, and the communities we feed.

The agreement includes landsharing for farming and also for living. The principles are based on exchanges of various kinds of value - social, ecological, economic, and cultural - where all parties aim to provide and receive value commensurate with use and need. We acknowledge the privilege that Jonai have in ‘owning’ title to unceded sovereign land, and seek through a rent-free landsharing agreement and in our daily practices to break down imbalances in power or fairness in our relations with each other and with djandak.

There is a largely institutional development towards ‘Agroecology Lighthouses’ championed by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and NGOs intended to signal the way forward to the agroecological transition so needed to deal justly with future generations. We prefer ‘beacon’ rather than ‘lighthouse’, as lighthouses were developed to keep trade moving through the night in the endless pursuit of profit, and lighthouses are lonely places that tell travellers to stay away. Beacons, on the other hand, are lit by communities to show the way – they can be beacons of hope, and beacons of love. The Agroecology Beacon is working steadily to contribute to the rapidly growing movement of beacons all around the world, where smallholders are radically transforming the food system from the ground up, while paying the rent and working towards decolonial futures.

Continue to learn as we do on The Farmer and the Butcher!

Philosophy

Some people (even smart ones) have asked: ‘but if you’re just going to kill it and eat it anyway, why does it matter what sort of life the pig had?’ We abhor cruelty to animals, and we believe they are a nutritious and delicious part of the human diet. As with many other pastured livestock farmers, our pigs should only have ‘one bad day’, and they shouldn’t even know it’s coming.

In their daily lives, we respect our animals’ instincts and relative autonomy, and our animals are free to roam, root, and wallow as they would in the wild. We think it’s unconscionable to choose meat from an animal that has lived its life in pain and misery so it could end up on our plates, and if the ethics of the matter don’t win you over, the flavour will.

If you check out any of the Australian pastured pig farmers listed on FlavourCrusader, you’ll find far superior flavours to intensively-farmed pork. Hopefully as the number of pastured pig and poultry farmers increases around Australia and the rest of the world, we can all enjoy ethical, quality meat that has travelled few miles so that we also decrease our carbon footprints, all while supporting local farmers – everybody wins! And just because you found us or one of the other beautiful ethical livestock farmers flourishing across Australia doesn’t mean we want you to eat meat with abandon. As Slow Meat has coined, ‘eat better meat, less.’

Our own decision to eat only meat from animals raised ethically is what ultimately led to our decision to join the growing movement of small farmers who place animal welfare first. We are grateful to those who’ve gone before us, and the generosity of the many small producers who taught us so much when we embraced a life of farming. We feel honoured and privileged to be amongst their ranks in contributing positively to the world’s food systems.

Inspired by the rare breed movement, which is working to preserve biodiversity in agriculture by growing rare and heritage breeds commercially, we chose to raise heritage-breed Large Black pigs and a variety of heritage and modern-breed cattle on pasture to fulfil this goal. We were strongly motivated by our ethics to raise animals in a high welfare system on pasture, not realizing the full complexity of ecological, social, and political entanglements our path would reveal.

As we have deepened our experience and knowledge of this Country in our relatively short time as custodians, we have also come to better understand the compelling need to ‘decolonize ourselves’, and to affirm solidarity with First Peoples in order to grow a future for Australia that is ecologically sustainable and socially just for all.

Jonai Core Values & Objectives

Jonai Values & Objectives

Values

We value Nature, from which we are not exceptional

We value holistic decision making

We value an aromatically & aesthetically pleasing farm

We value relationships with our human and other-than-human communities

We value collaboration & eschew competition

We value degrowth: frugal abundance & radical sufficiency for all

We value surplus materials & nutrient for re-use &/or feed on farm

We value labour over capital & strive to do things for ourselves within our means and resources

We value patience – nature takes time, & patience tastes delicious

Objectives

To raise animals, plants, and microbes ethically, ecologically, justly & economically to feed ourselves and our community

To control the means of production, processing & distribution

To sell directly via: farm gate & households (CSA)

To enact and be a voice for agroecology, food sovereignty, & degrowth

FAQs

What exactly are your pigs fed?

Our pigs enjoy somewhere between 10 and 20% of their diet by grazing and rooting in the soil in their paddocks. They’re also fed spent brewers’ grain from Holgate Brewery in Woodend, whey from Azzurri Cheese in the Macedon Ranges, and whatever 'waste' Stuart can scavenge from the system - e.g. seconds of eggs from a local pastured egg producer, cheese from hospitality suppliers or corn from a whiskey distillery, it's all great fodder in an agroecological model. (Our cattle also enjoy occasional rations of the spent brewers’ grain, hence ‘beer-fed beef’.) We are working to grow more of their feed here on the farm, through planting fodder crops (such as root crops, brassicas, sunflowers, lupins, and cereal rye) in paddocks that are resting, and they are also fed seconds and windfall from our region when available such as potatoes, strawberries, oats, apples, acorns, chestnuts, and early-season colostrum-rich milk from a neighbouring dairy.

Do you castrate your pigs?

Yes. After an initial year of choosing not to castrate, we faced issues with boars reaching sexual maturity early and impregnating their sisters, as well as some boar taint in the meat. As our pigs are a slow-growing rare breed, they don’t reach a good marketable size until 7 or 8 months, by which time they are well and truly sexually mature. As we prefer to keep our pigs in family groups from birth until slaughter (rather than separating the boars out by around 3 months old), we have chosen to castrate and keep them together in their litters. Stuart performs the castration, and he was trained first by an experienced free-range pig farmer and then by our vet to be deemed competent at the procedure. Our decision to castrate was documented by the series we did with Radio National Bush Telegraph if you’d like to learn more.

I’m worried about how animals are treated at abattoirs – can you please explain what happens to your pigs, and how you ensure they are subjected to minimal stress at the time of slaughter?

We take our pigs to an abattoir about an hour from the farm in a trailer with a rubber mat and bedded with hay, avoiding the hottest periods of the day during summer. Our pigs are unloaded immediately through to the stunning chamber without being kept in the holding pens with any other pigs. Our abattoir uses CO2 for stunning, which is generally considered best practice in Australia as the pigs are rendered unconscious within 30 seconds, before being slaughtered by a cut to the neck. We have reservations about CO2 stunning as it is an aversive gas, but have no other options to date. We are working towards our ultimate goal to build an abattoir on the farm. 

Are you certified organic? 

We consider ourselves certified by our community. We practice radical transparency – anyone is welcome to come and tour the paddocks and ask us any questions you like at any time (though we do close and try to take Sundays off where possible). As our focus is on increasing the amount of feed from so-called waste streams such as the spent brewers’ grain or other agricultural seconds, we couldn’t certify organic if we wanted to, but we’re primarily concerned with localising our production system and moving away from commodity animal feed being trucked in from elsewhere. We do not apply any agricultural chemicals to any of our paddocks, do not allow any GMO products in our feed, and do not have any routine use of veterinary medicines in our system.

READ LIKE THE JONAI

BOOKS

• Dalrymple, L. & Hilliard, G. (2020) The Ethical Omnivore: A practical guide and 60 nose-to-tail recipes for sustainable meat eating, Murdoch.

• Elliott, et al. 2023. We have a lot of (un)learning to do: whiteness and decolonial prefiguration in a food movement organisation

• Evans, M. (2019) On Eating Meat: The truth about its production and the ethics of eating it, Murdoch.

• Fernandez Arias, P., T. Jonas, & K. Munksgaard (2019) Farming Democracy: Radically transforming the food system from the ground up, Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance.

• Gammage, B. & B. Pascoe. (2022) Country: Future Fire, Future Farming, Thames & Hudson.

• Giraldo & Rosset. 2022. Emancipatory Agroecologies: social and political principles

• Henderson, G. (1943) The Farming Ladder, Faber & Faber.

• Holt-Giménez, E. (2017) The Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism: Understanding the political economy of what we eat, Monthly Review Press.

• Kimmerer, R.W. (2021) The Democracy of Species, Penguin.

• Leonard, C. (2014) The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business, Simon & Schuster.

• Massy, C. (2017) Call of the Reed Warbler, UQP.

• Pascoe, B. (2014) Dark Emu, Magabala Books.

• Pollan, M. (2006) The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Bloomsbury.

• Rosset & Altieri. 2017. Agroecology: Science & Politics, Practical Action Publishing.

• Singer, P. (1975) Animal Liberation, Thorsons.

• Spector, T. (2020) Spoon Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong, Random House UK.

• Wallace, R. (2016) Big Farms Make Big Flu, Monthly Review Press.

• Yunkaporta, T. (2019) Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, Text Publishing Co.

PODCASTS

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Upstream

The Sustainable Food Trust Podcast – Patrick Holden

Money. Power. Land. Solidarity. GP Jacob

Global Capitalism – Democracy at Work

The Regenerative Journey with Charlie Arnott

Damn the Absolute – Jeffrey Howard

Farm Commons

The RegenNarration – Anthony James

Deep in the Weeds – A Food Podcast with Anthony Huckstep

Low Tox Life with Alexx Stuart

Eat Like the Animals

Sustainable Table have excellent resources to better understand the ethics of eating animals and how to decode standards

Check out Flavour Crusader for incredible lists of ethical and ecologically-sound producers.

Choice have a page devoted to understanding the standards