The Frew's at Belli Beef

Our next Natural Sequence Farming Champion story takes us to Ridgewood, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, where Scott and Adele Frew run Belli Beef, a regenerative beef cattle farm implementing contours across the steeper landscape of their property. "This is Scott, my husband," Adele says. "This is Adele, my wife," Scott says back. "She's the boss, runs most of the farm. I just drive the big toys."

Across the property's steeper landscape, contours come first.

"We're just trying to see where they settle out with their fertility," Scott says. "I think that's the first thing, because if you can stop the rainwater rushing down those slopes, it's going to help improve the landscape for the betterment of the soil."

It's a simple starting point with a bigger purpose behind it: let nature take care of what's going on.

Belli Beef sits at the top of the Mary Valley river system, which makes what happens on this property matter well beyond its own boundaries.

"The first thing you want to do is stop all the minerals washing away and just going out to sea," Scott explains. "We want to trap our fertility on the property."

By putting contours on the slopes, water is caught instead of rushing straight into the catchment. It stops, leaks slowly underground to help fix the water table, and moves back uphill again through capillary action. The grass species start to change as it goes, a visible sign of fertility building where it once washed away.

The ponds tucked into the corners of the contour system do double duty, offering some flood mitigation while storing water that can be pumped back up into the contours when it's needed.

"Wherever there's water, there's life," Scott says. "That's effectively what we're doing."

Belli Beef is also home to Wild Barrel, the only farm-based microbrewery on the Sunshine Coast.

"Normally microbreweries are supposed to be in industrial estates," Adele says. "It took us a while to get that." The beer is naturally barrel-aged, 200 bottles per barrel, and once that batch is gone, it's gone. It's not production beer, and that's the point: the brewer draws on fruit grown on the farm's syntropic system, jaboticaba among it, using it to catch wild yeast or blend into the beer itself.

For Scott and Adele, the brewery is really an extension of the same philosophy driving everything else on the farm.

"We want a lot of biology in our soils, because if you get the biology right, you'll get the mineral content right, and actually bring a better product that's healthier for people to eat," Adele says.

It's what Adele calls closing the loop between the land, the cattle and the consumer.

"We're all basically just trying to give back a little bit more than what we take. That's better for their health, better for us, better for the environment. It just closes the loop."

Scott's next goal is to plant rows along the bottom of every contour on the property, ideally with species the cattle can eat once they're mature.

"That would be everything," he says. "It would help the whole system again in regenerative farming, which would be awesome."

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👉 Watch Scott and Adele’s full story here: https://youtu.be/Y9vh0erRdL4

Peter Andrews OAM spent his life showing people that there's a better way to work with the landscape. This story continues that mission, proof that the work is happening right now on farms right across Australia.

Let's Rehydrate Australia - together.

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This is the ninth story in our Rehydrate Australia series, sharing the journeys of farmers and land managers implementing Natural Sequence Farming across Australia.