Otto Wolki crouches beside a wire pen holding a chook like a football he’s about to pass, explaining in a matter-of-fact tone why his birds don’t die. “My chickens are a bit more tougher than other chickens,” he says. “They fly 20 metres up a tree and the fox can’t get up there.”
Honestly, they look a bit like the fox has already had a chew, but Otto insists nude necks are the sign of a superior bird. “Bare-neckers don’t lay as many eggs as Isa Browns, but it’s not worth chickens dying every night from a fox.”
Otto is eight and sells poultry from the family home, Wolki Farm, near the village of Woomargama on the southern slopes of New South Wales. It’s early days—he’s only taken three orders—but he’s progressing with the calm realism of someone who’s done this before. He retired his bottle opener business to get into the chook game.
Wolki Farm is 150 acres of gentle hills speckled with box Eucalypt—so far so normal—until you look closely at its inhabitants, almost all of whom are from the African subcontinent. “We choose breeds that survive rather than perform,” Jake says.
So there are Nguni cattle from southern Africa, Damara sheep from Namibia and Fayoumi chickens from Egypt. The Berkshire pigs are somewhat of an anomaly, though when we visit Jake is loading them onto a truck destined for a nearby abattoir.
“They’re cantankerous things,” he calls while pushing one ball of muscle up a ramp with a red plastic board. Pretty soon, they’ll land on the plates of Wolki Farm’s happy customers.
Inside the house, Ann is cooking for our week-long shoot, providing two meals a day for the 20-person crew. On the menu? Plenty of that Wolki bacon, along with Wolki eggs, sausages and even a pork belly salad. It’s all delicious.
I don’t think my catering is necessarily anything fancy,” she says, “but I do get a lot of good feedback from people and I think that’s just the quality of the ingredients.”
By now Otto is finished feeding his chooks and is wielding a knife as big as his forearm—chopping kale that will form part of a salad. Ann doesn’t hover. On Wolki Farm, the kids learn by doing. “They see the whole circle,” she says, “and it makes them a lot more appreciative of where their food comes from.”
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