Our Story

SOS….Saving Our Soil through bio-dynamics. What's it all about? by Mark Rathbone

Most people have heard about organics and maybe a few about bio-dynamics, but what's that all about and how is it different from organics?

My family has been bio-dynamic farming since December 1965 (when I was just 2 years old) so I am probably in a really good position to explain it.

My name is Mark Rathbone and I run my own business called Save Our Soil Australia. Our mission is to inform people of the regenerative nature of bio-dynamic agriculture by growing tasty fruit and vegetables, selling them through farmers' markets and providing information on the subject via our website, speaking engagements and other media.

What experience have you had with bio-dynamics and food in general?

In the early 1960s, my father attended lectures on bio-dynamics by Alex Podolinsky (the founder of Australian Demeter Biodynamics) which were sometimes done on a farm, whilst walking around a paddock. In the early seventies, as a young child, I remember going to many of these farm walks. The farmers went on and on about soil, even walking and talking in the rain whilst I had some big ugly raincoat thrown over me and worrying that it looked like a dress.

Dad, being an ex-conventional farmer, told me horrible stories about when he used to spray chemicals on the family orchard (mainly pesticides). He said "There was little instruction given in those days on to how to use the chemical sprays, no safety gear and you would stir it up with your hand". These were the days of DDT, so after he would spray, feeling sick the next day would sometimes occur.

As a result, in my teenage years, I was a little nervous to say the least, when I worked on conventional tomato farms (to earn money to buy my first car) and see pesticide spray planes fly overhead, not far from where we were picking.

When I left school at age 17, I started working on the family dairy farm and it wasn't long before we were hit with one of the worst droughts ever in 1983. It was so bad, farmers weren't able to feed or sell all the cattle they had bred up over the years, so they had to dig these huge pits just down the road from us and destroy hundreds of cows from all the neighboring farms. (Unfortunately this was the most humane thing to do, considering they would starve to death.) Despite it being one of our worst droughts ever, the price of milk never increased enough to help farmers out. These were the times when supermarkets were starting to exercise their retail muscle, and keeping milk cheap was high on their priorities to push out the milk bars.

 To supplement my income, I worked in a conventional milk factory and fruit preserving factories as a plant attendant. This meant I went to all parts of the factories to maintain different sorts of machinery which gave me a good overview of the conventional food production system.

I did a year or two at a biodynamic / organic food wholesaler, selling to major retailers in late 80’s. This experience showed me that major retailers were only interested in one thing, not quality, not health, but only if the product sold or not. Their shelf space was like real estate and if it didn’t have a good financial return, the product was dropped from their range.

In that time, I learnt about cheese making in a factory at Timboon (it was only for an intensive week, but informative none the less). I soon realized after standing in a white room, wearing a white coat and white hat that I was never going to build a milk factory. I learnt about biodynamic wine making at Robinvale in the mid 90’s before going on to selling biodynamic wine direct. 

One of my main goals in life though was I always wanted to have a paddock to plate biodynamic food system. I started a home delivery service in 1994 which ran for 7 years, then started growing vegetables part time on our home dairy farm in 2000.

Coincidentally, the longest drought in our farming history came around at the same time and I knew vegetables were going to be more sustainable than dairy farming. The financial return was far more efficient per megalitre of water than dairy farming. So in 2008 I obtained a government grant to find underground water which gave us adequate irrigation for vegetable production.

In 2009 a neighbour came over the fence and offered to buy the dairy farm for the price my parents would obtain in a year of high rainfall. It wasn’t that the land was highly valued but the irrigation water attached to it was. So my parents, at age 73, sold off the dairy farm so they could retire and I decided to just grow vegetables on my own 50-acre property (which was the back paddock of the original 400-acre dairy farm) .

Now in 2024 I have been running Save our Soil full time for 15 years, growing seasonal biodynamic vegetables for over 200 families every week .

(See our “Farmers Market” tab).