Lovely weather for pasture-raised ducks
It's been an age since we've been able to find them but now so let's talk about pasture-raised ducks from
Tathra Park Farm.
Tathra’s ducks are an Aylesbury/Pekin cross that provide good breast meat yield and lovely light golden fat and we've just started buying them for you and Fred's restaurant in Paddington. This also means that we're reprising our Cassoulet kits, a short-cut to a lovely one-pot wonder full of confit duck legs, duck stock, Toulouse sausages, lamb, smoked pork and beans.
Farm visit to Tathra Park
On Monday 10 June, to celebrate HRH QE II's birthday, Mr Bone took himself off to chilly Taralga to visit the Tathra ducks. Luke and Pia Winder, an energetic couple with three young children, run Tathra Park Free Range, a 100 acre mixed enterprise farm, 10 minutes north of Taralga in the NSW Southern Tablelands.
With significant remnant forested areas on a mix of flat and sloping land it is an ideal environment for the rotational grazing system, championed by American farmer, Joel Salatin and faithfully reproduced by the Winders. There are many aspects to this system but principally it involves each of the different species spending limited time in any one paddock, and then having that paddock left for extended rest periods of 4 - 10 months to allow for re-sowing and pasture recovery.
At nearly 1000 m above sea level, snow in Winter is not uncommon. The upside of that is that it rarely gets above mid-30’s in Summer, which is good, because ducks can handle the cold, but not the heat. That also goes for the cattle, pigs and egg chickens that thrive on this highly productive farm. The farm is supplied by pure bore water from the nearby Wombeyan Caves aquifer. The water is pumped to a central reservoir and is reticulated around the entire farm giving all the animals constant access to clean unpolluted water, a critical but often overlooked requirement for the production of high quality meat and poultry.
