“Yallamundi is a unique place, it’s a 2900 ha farm with 318,000 olive trees surrounding a natural lagoon. The laying hens enjoy living here, that gives us a good feeling. The birds can go wherever they want, feel safe under the olive trees where they can forage and sleep in mobile sheds. There are fences somewhere, but the chickens never get to see them.”
Piet Groot is the farm manager at Yallamundi, a very sustainable and unique egg farm in Australia where chickens ‘travel’ in mobile sheds.
“My father was born in the Beemster region in Holland, he went to Africa and from there we arrived in Australia in 2000.”
“Yallamundi is originally an aboriginal name, it has different meanings like ‘meeting place’ or ‘place with a lot of water’. Our goal is sustainability and educating people, with our story we want to convince others to be sustainable as well. Part of our profit goes to charity, we provide scholarships to children of families that can’t afford higher education. We are a lot more than a chicken farm, we are a company with chickens at the heart.”
“We have huge areas for the chickens. For that reason we developed mobile ventilated sheds for them. The laying hens are moved to fresh pasture at regular intervals, which gives them interesting new surroundings to explore. This setup also allows the land to regenerate itself, which reinforces our commitment to sustainable farming."
“Our mobile sheds work much better for egg production than cages, we can see the difference in the quality of the eggs. We get much stronger shells and the yolk has a better colour. We’re proud to be adopting this kind of actively managed mobile grazing system and are happy to know our hens have the optimum environment in which to thrive. Everyone likes to work around the sheds.”
“We also placed hundreds of solar panels on top of our mobile sheds, as part of our goal to become carbon neutral in 2022. One third of our land here at Yallamundi is put aside as a biodiverse nature corridor – meaning wildlife can move and flourish in a healthy natural environment.”
“When we started this project, we were not sure if the chickens would come home to the shed at night. Many people ask how we get them in at night, but it’s just natural behaviour. It is very nice to look at in the evening, all these birds coming home to sleep together in the shed.”
“Because of the size of the terrain, we had a problem with foxes and other predators. We therefore use dogs to protect the birds, they even live with them. It is a type of dog (Maremma) from Italy that prefers to bond with other animals rather than people."
“We bought the first RED-L system from Vencomatic Group about six years ago. The relationship is very important for us. It’s the people that make doing business enjoyable. We have a good partnership with Vencomatic Group and together we build the most modern products. And I think we will be doing this for many years to come.”