As the sun rises in Freshwater Creek’s winter July, it’s warmth is absent, working purely to light the sky. Farmer Andy Smith treads mindfully past tufts of frosty, dew-laced grass. Scanning the paddock with a practiced eye, he watches for small, unsteady movements that signal a newborn lamb or mother in need. Twice a day, every lambing season, Smith carries out this favourite past time. On his daily quiet circuit, he soaks up his alone time, admiring the land he’s worked for 42 years.
As he scans for signs of new life, Andy draws in sharp breaths of icy air. The open paddocks only hear whispers of the dawn’s chorus. Tunes of singing Galahs and gang gang cockatoos. His ears prick, differentiating their distinct calls. The chestnut-breasted shelducks “softly coo and honk,” he says.
Equipped in his standard farmer’s button-up flannel and dark sage-green Kathmandu jacket, Andy’s blue eyes delight in the sight of nature. With each step, his lived-in boots bend the blades of grass beneath him. His presence, a gentle thread in the energy web connecting land, sheep, and farmer as symbiotic partners in the natural system.
Andy, 72, has spent the majority of his life on this patch of countryside between Geelong and Torquay, where he and his wife look after an 800-acre farm. The heart of his business is sheep, with 800 mothers yielding nearly a thousand lambs each year. While much of Victoria’s farmland has shifted to embrace bigger machinery and chemical farming, Andy’s methods remain rooted in careful animal husbandry, ecological grazing, and a belief that farming should “work with nature rather than against it”.
Andy endorses a holistic farming approach that rejects monoculture ideologies. Industrial farming “blows away biodiversity by mechanising things which used to involve people,” he said. For the most part, Andy remains a caring shepherd who lets his flock manage themselves.
“I love trying to integrate the natural world and the farming world,” he said, drawing on his passion for ecology to breed sheep that can thrive and lamb unaided. Protecting this balance between nature and farming is what motivates him each day.
“I’m very against people regarding family land as just a vehicle for producing something they can sell,” he says. “It’s taking humans out of the agricultural landscape, as well as other life forms,” he says.
According to Meat & Livestock Australia, farmers adopting rotational grazing help pastures recover, supporting greater biodiversity and more sustainable livestock production.
Such beliefs haven’t simply grown from working the soil; they’re rooted in a lifetime of curiosity and learning. Before settling into the rhythms of rural life, Andy took a winding academic road.
“Until I started farming, I was heading to be a little overeducated,” he says.
Andy Studied medicine at Melbourne University for three and a half years before switching to environmental studies in Queensland, fields far from sheep and paddocks, but crucial to his scientific approach.
“It’s not just studying science itself, but the scientific way of approaching things,” Andy says.
Andy’s habit of contesting the status quo and seeking evidence shapes everything, from grazing management to his resistance to chemical-heavy farming.
For Andy, his place on the farm is as much the result of tradition as choice. Owning land and tending sheep, runs deep in his family’s story, a legacy carried mostly from father to son.
Despite the solitude that sometimes marks farming life, Andy has never felt isolated or cut off. With his wife, he is part of a close-knit network of neighbours and friends. With the famous Freshwater Creek cake shop nearby milk and fuel are only “two minutes away”
“We have people all around us,” Andy says. “Good network of neighbours and friends close by,” he says.
For Andy, farming is as much about “expressing yourself and socialising” as it is about raising animals. It’s a way of life grounded in ecology, biodiversity, and respect for the natural world.
This story is part of a project exploring regional Victoria and the issues farmers are facing. See the whole collection here.
