Our forests

It’s not every day we get to make dreams come true. But Emma’s dream is now growing on her farm, in Gippsland, Victoria, after we planted 30,000 native trees at Glorious Googies in June 2016.

“My dream is finally in motion! With a team of Greenfleet superheroes, we're working to turn all the steep and wet parts of my farm back to native bush. This is an area of 34.5 hectares!! I can't wait for the day that I can make this area into a sanctuary for our native animals and birds and see bush instead of bare hills being reduced by wind and soil erosion.”

Emma Brown could not wipe the smile off her face in June 2016, for every tree planted on her farm by the Greenfleet team brought her one step closer to fulfil a dream she’s had ever since she bought the land.

After investigating a range of options over the years, from grants to partnerships with not-for-profits, Emma had concluded that “Greenfleet was the only organisation that could help me do what I wanted to do.”

Together with tree planting professional Frank and his team, we planted 30,000 native trees at Glorious Googies with a mixture of 28 species, re-establishing the wet forest and warm temperate rainforest ecosystem that once existed on the Gippsland farm.

“The team at Greenfleet is very clever. They have done a survey of what the original bush would have been like. They're also using flowering native plants that are indigenous at my request for the insects and bees and birds,” Emma explained.

“The area we’ve chosen is steep and rugged – and should never have been cleared in the first place. Working with Greenfleet provides us with a great opportunity to leave a legacy beyond what the two of us and our chooks could ever hope to do,” she added.

Trees will help with the visible erosion on Korumburra and provide natural shelter for the 1,200 free-range chooks which spend their days foraging around the paddocks. “It gets windy here – so the trees will help with protection against the wind, as well as with the water evaporation that further damages the soil,” she explains.

A recent academic study by Nagle and Glatz has found enriching the free-range environment attracts chickens out of their coops and onto the land. The research confirms that well-sheltered pasture areas produce healthier and happier hens.

Emma is “100 per cent confident” that the revegetation process of this ‘chicken haven’ will improve the farm’s productivity, as well as providing new habitat for native wildlife.

“It will be a ‘bush block’ that we can enjoy for bushwalks in our own backyard. How good is that?”