A life change, and a goal to work towards Self Sufficiency in Far North Queensland, Australia

Misty Creek Farm is located in Beatrice on the Atherton Tablelands of Far North Queensland, Australia.

Here on our 20 acre farm my Husband and I rear a small heard of ex-dairy cattle from calves, raise an ever expanding flock of chickens, rear pigs on occasion, are in the process of establishing a food forest and mastering the art of growing our own vegetables in the sub tropics/wet tropics. 

Our goal is to become as self sufficient as possible. Over the last couple of years since moving to Misty Creek Farm from Western Australia in 2022, we successfully reared steers and pigs for meat, and poultry for meat and eggs.

The food forest is still a work in progress, as the fruit trees are still young and are not yet productive. When we first arrived at our property the two paddocks which are now our food forest location were very overgrown and unrecognisable compared to how they are today. 

As for growing a successful garden for vegetables, this has been trial and error. It’s is extremely wet here, we receive 2.5 metres of rain annually, and with the rain the cloud cover limits the sun from shining. We have not mastered successful vegetable as gardening yet, we produce bits and pieces here and there, but not consistently to be able to ditch the grocery store produce.

We have the likes of rats, bandicoots, currawongs, and scrub turkeys that love to eat what does grow making gardening challenging. Not to mention last Year’s Wet Season where the Monsoon lasted from cyclone Jasper in December 2023 to late September 2024 with barely a Dry Season in between making the ground so muddy and saturated, plants suffocated from being so wet.

We have been extremely successful with our meat and egg production, we no longer buy meat and eggs which is a HUGE plentiful position to be in. And it tastes so much better!!

As for dairy, we don’t raise any of our cattle for milk production. Since I work for Mungalli Creek Dairy I don’t need to. I’d say 80% of the dairy products we consume are produced by Mungalli Creek Dairy, and you can’t beat the best!!

We also have an Australian Stumpy Tail Cattle dog. He is almost 3 years old, and his name is Jed or Jedi (pronounced “Jed-dee”). Although he’s a stumpy tail, he was born with a tail, which he’s not always on good terms with. He seems to think his tail gets him into mischief. Jedi has quite the personality… he’s also the mascot for Misty Creek Soap. He makes it into Newspaper Articles, photobombs my product photos, and always lets the Post Office ladies know when I’ve arrived by barking when I’ve left the car to collect mail or send off online orders.

A prominent feature on our property is our creek that flows all year. We’ve named it ‘Misty Creek’ as I don’t believe it has a gazetted name. Misty Creek has two small waterfalls and a two swimming holes. The larger waterfall where my product photos are taken lets off mist in winter when the creek water is warmer than the air temperature. We enjoy watching the mist as the sun rises with a cup of coffee and admiring our magnificent view.

We still have a lot of learning to do, and trial and error to achieve our goals. But the best things is being able to learn from the friends we have made, and also teach our friends in return new skills to get to where we want to be in our self sufficiency journey.

Nothing comes into fruition without hard work, perseverance and determination.