MICHAEL Wohlstadt is an old-school mixed farmer.

Mr Wohlstadt, 64, runs a property near Lyndoch in the southern Barossa Valley known as The Dairyman Barossa that boasts a diverse range of livestock and produce unlikely to be seen elsewhere in the state.

“We do buttercream and buttermilk, we do free-range pork, we do milk veal, oyster mushrooms, accommodation and have vineyards,” said Michael, who employs two locals to help him.

“So there are six links and three of us to run it.”

Mr Wohlstadt even has a mix of jobs, with a 45-year career in planning and local government behind him. The former Gawler Council planning officer is also an “occasional member” of the State Commission Assessment Panel (SCAP).

At his property between Lyndoch and Williamstown, he owns 32 hectares “and I rent 40 acres (16 hectares) across the road”.

The landholding was originally “just a sheep property” with no vineyard so Mr Wohlstadt built the dairy from scratch. 

“I used to milk 40 (Jersey) cows. I have 45 now but I don’t milk any more than 20,” he said.

“The others are either raised for meat, being veal, because they are the male calves, or they are the replacement stock.”

Mr Wohlstadt has 60 to 80 free-range Berkshire and Tamworth pigs, which he said were likely the only milk-fed pig herd in Australia. 

“I am not aware of any others in Australia,” he said.

The pigs are also fed local grain that he mills.

“Customers say they’ve never tasted bacon or sausages like that, and quite important restaurants in the city and Barossa Valley are purchasers of the meat and/or the whole range of products,” Mr Wohlstadt said.

“Dairy Vale used to collect the milk. I had three things running – milking the cows twice a day, running a full-time practice and three kids.

“It got to the stage where I stopped milking the cows, and put in the vineyard.

“Running the property was a weekend affair for about 15 years and then I went back to it.

“I was always keen to come back to it one way or the other, but the dairy industry had moved on.

“It had shifted more to the South-East and it also needed 200 cows – bigger than what is required for this size property.

”So I really had to look at the value-adding option. It started very tiny and I didn’t imagine it would emerge to this now.”

The Dairyman Barossa also runs “exclusive self-contained farm accommodation” – The Dairyman’s Cottage, and The Chaff House, which dates back to the 1840s.

Asked to define mixed farming, Mr Wohlstadt said: “It’s not typical these days, but if I go back to when I grew up in the Barossa, it was typical.

“We’ve gravitated very much to specialisation or a monoculture to a large degree and there has been a displacement of commodity food production as a consequence of that.

“To help people understand the difference, I say to them ‘ask the question, do farmers produce food?’.

“And the answer, typically, people say ‘yes’, but the (real) answer is ‘no’; they produce commodities.

“Wheat has to become flour, milk has to be pasteurised, packaged, distributed, but here, everything that leaves the farm leaves as food.

“So it’s not only mixed farming, but actually the paddock to plate, commodity to food, which is the defining difference.”

Mr Wohlstadt said “there was certainly a lot of interest by consumers” in the farmgate culture that had emerged in Australian farms in recent years.

“But is there an overwhelming movement to it?” he said 

“I don’t really see that – there are people who give it a go.

“The skillset you need from start to finish – not everyone has that.

“I’ve been for a long time an advocate of (trying to encourage farmers to think differently), particularly with family farms that don’t see a future in farming, but they’re actually just doing it the way it’s always been done.

“They’ve got to go from a grower and a producer, to a processor, to a wholesaler, to a distributor, to a marketer, and also give up a lot of their personal time in retailing as well.

“So it’s a very diverse skillset and people either don’t have that skillset – and it requires capital as well – so people are safer with what they know.

“So there are a lot of barriers.”

Mr Wohlstadt agreed that consumers were happy to pay a bit more for a product if they were aware of its free-range background.

“People, even with the B&Bs staying here, are just delightful,” he said.

“And yes, they are prepared to pay more for quality and to know where it is coming from and that it’s fresh and not industrially produced and doesn’t have things added to it.”

Mr Wohlstadt said customers who bought his farm’s products at Barossa Famers Market or Adelaide Showground Farmers Market were looking for something different to mainstream food.

“Those who come are looking for it – you expect it, because that’s why they bother to go to the markets,” he said.

Mr Wohlstadt said in relation to his milk-fed pigs, “it’s the way it used to be; on mixed farms, it used to be that people had a small herd”.

“Everything sort of emerged from subsistence farming and then they’d have a bit of surplus and sell it off and there were small cash crops,” he said.

“One of those things that emerged was to have a small dairy herd and you’d separate the milk on the farm for cream, sell it, typically to Golden North, and what would you do with the skim milk? 

“You’d have a small herd of pigs and then you’d have a few surplus and be sold on the market and use them yourself.

“I saw that as a kid. My parents came from Berlin after the war, and the first place they lived was Gladstone in the Mid North. Family farmers were very welcoming to migrants.”

The Wohlstadts then moved to Elizabeth, where Mr Wohlstadt went to primary school.

“But I’ve always wanted to be a farmer – (which was) actively discouraged by my parents, and grandparents, in particular,” he said.

“My grandfather was a bookkeeper who thought banking would be a much better choice.”

Mr Wohlstadt said his parents were in hospitality – “they were the first managers of what is now Lyndoch Hill; was the Barossa Motel”.

“So I grew up in hospitality but there was a dairy farm across the road, so fortunately that is where I always ended up after school,” he said.

Getting into farming “wasn’t easy”.

“I was 23, interest rates were 18 per cent and bridging finance was 22 per cent,” he said.

“The fact I kept my (local government planning) profession running concurrently with this, which meant extraordinary working hours, was the only way it was possible.

“So I’ve always had two lives in a working sense.”