May Volp - Full Circle Farm Toowoomba
I’m May and I have a market garden in Meringandan just outside of Toowoomba.
Full Circle Farm is a small scale operation with a mission of saving compostable waste from landfill and using it to grow more food that gets sold back to chefs and the broader community. I grow a lot of leafy greens, radishes, microgreens, edible flowers and heirloom tomatoes in the warmer seasons.
I got into farming through a passion for backyard growing and composting. I wanted to do something about reducing the huge amounts of organic waste going to landfill and I also wanted to grow food on a larger scale. It made sense to bring the two ideas together to form a model for my farm. I started collecting waste and composting like crazy! Then I built my beds (no dig) and started growing. Then I slowly built a customer base of local cafes and restaurants and the broader community through farmers markets.
I had big dreams for a long time about having a farm and my expectations were a little romantic perhaps; tending to crops on beautiful soft sunny days, frolicking in green pastures of salad greens and popping around to cafes doing deliveries. The crazy thing is that these dreams were pretty accurate, although slightly sugarcoated. I have had to learn so much about managing pests and diseases organically, soil health, water management and even marketing and general business skills.
My biggest learning curve has been realising that planning is everything! I didn’t plan my first few months of planting very well and it came back to bite me when I was short on things or having gluts of other things ... big lesson!
Although there have been struggles I am proud to say that one year in the farm now supplies 6 cafes and restaurants weekly and attends a fortnightly market. I’m very excited to keep growing with this model - collecting more waste and growing more food.
The big dream is to have more land eventually to bring in animal integration and some different crops that require more space like pumpkins, corn and many more tomatoes as they’re my absolute favourite thing to grow.
Full Circle Farm
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