Misty Creek Agroforestry - Tree Range Chicken & Organic Eggs
I think a lot about food security. Not in an abstract, doomsday way, but in a very practical, everyday way. Who is growing our food? How old are they? What happens when they retire? And who is coming up behind them?
The average age of an Australian farmer is 58. That number has barely moved in years. The land is there. The knowledge is there. But the next generation of farmers largely isn't, because the barriers to entry are enormous and the culture around farming hasn't exactly made it look like an attractive career path.
That's what makes Tom and Nicole of Misty Creek Agroforestry so important to me, and why I'm so genuinely proud to be working with them.
They are young farmers doing it their way, from scratch, on land they found themselves, with a philosophy they built from the ground up. And what they've created in seven years is one of the most thoughtful, integrated small farms I've come across.
How it started
Tom grew up on a cattle property in Central West NSW. He left for the city, like most of his peers. Agriculture, as he saw it growing up, felt disconnected from both the land and from people. It wasn't a life he wanted.
But after years in the city, something wasn't right. He and Nicole did a permaculture design course in 2018 and discovered syntropic agroforestry, and that changed everything. They moved to the Northern Rivers, found 28 acres, and started building. Two people with a vision and the determination to figure it out.
So what is syntropic agroforestry and why does it matter?
This is the part I really want you to understand, because it's at the heart of why Misty Creek produces food the way it does.
Conventional farming, even well-meaning farming, is largely input-based. You add fertiliser, water, pest control. You extract a crop. You repeat. Over time, this depletes the land. Soil loses structure, biodiversity drops, and you need more inputs just to get the same result.
Syntropic agroforestry works completely differently. It's process-based, not input-based. It's built on the law of species succession, the idea that nature is always moving toward greater complexity, diversity and abundance if you let it. Instead of fighting that process, you work with it.
At Misty Creek, this means planting at maximum density, maintaining 100% ground cover at all times, and carefully managing pruning and rotation to keep the system in the right stage of growth. The goal is to maximise photosynthesis, to capture as much sunlight as possible and turn it into plant growth, soil life and food.
The result is a farm that gets more productive and more resilient over time, rather than less. That's not how most farms work. That's why this matters.
Where the chickens fit in
About a year into building their agroforest, Tom and Nicole had an opportunity to start raising pasture chickens. They quickly realised that poultry and agroforestry were a natural fit. Actually more than that, they were a genuine partnership.
The chickens are rotated through the food forest and pasture in a carefully managed system. Their foraging, scratching through mulch, eating insects and fallen fruit, depositing manure, actively builds the soil biology that supports the trees and plants around them. The trees and plants, in return, provide shelter, diversity of diet and a living environment for the birds.
What does that mean for the chicken you're eating?
It means this bird has lived the way a chicken is actually meant to live. Moving. Foraging. Eating a varied, natural diet. Not in a shed, not on a bare paddock, not eating only grain. Slow-grown birds raised this way develop real flavour, real texture, and genuine nutritional density that you simply cannot replicate in a conventional system.
Tom makes the point himself. Their Tree Range chickens sell at $26/kg at the farmers market, compared to as little as $3.50/kg for an industrial supermarket bird. The people who buy them aren't paying for a luxury. They're paying for the actual cost of growing food properly, and they understand they're getting far more nutrition, far better animal welfare, and far greater ecological benefit for that dollar.
Holistic management: the other half of the picture
Alongside syntropic agroforestry, Tom and Nicole use holistic management to make decisions about how the farm runs. This is a framework developed by ecologist Allan Savory that helps farmers make better decisions by keeping the whole system, environmental, social and economic, in view at once.
In practice, it's what helps Tom and Nicole use both plants and animals to achieve their goals without compromising one for the other. It's also what keeps them honest about growth. They've made a deliberate decision not to expand beyond what they can manage with real attention and care. They want to stay connected to every part of the farm. That restraint is rare, and it's a mark of farmers who are in this for the right reasons.
Why food security starts here
We talk a lot about buying local, and I believe in it deeply. But buying local isn't just about food miles. It's about what kind of food system we're building together.
When you buy a Misty Creek chicken, you're supporting two young farmers who left conventional careers to do something harder and more meaningful. You're supporting a farming model that builds soil rather than depletes it, that increases biodiversity rather than reducing it, and that treats animals with genuine dignity. You're supporting the kind of small-scale, innovative, ecologically grounded agriculture that our food system desperately needs more of.
What we're offering at CVO from June 2026 onwards:
We're starting with Misty Creek’s whole ‘Tree Range’ chickens, approx. 2kg, supplied cryovac'd fresh then frozen immediately for maximum freshness for you to consume when you are ready.
As the relationship grows we hope to bring you breast and Maryland cuts as well. And we'll also be offering their organic eggs through CVO, a gap I've genuinely been wanting to fill for you for a while now.
This is a producer I feel really good about. I hope you do too.
Bree x
Misty Creek Agroforestry, Northern Rivers NSW.
Pasture-raised.
Agroforestry-integrated.
Seven years in the making.
