CHRIS & LEE HALL | WOMBAT, NSW

REGENERATIVELY GROWN CHERRIES

many of you (like me!) will consider being able to start the season with cherries super exciting news!  for those of you who have yet to have had the enormous pleasure of tasting the hall’s cherries, i promise you are in for a treat.

for many years chris worked in the family business, a large conventional, mainly export, cherry growing operation, but increasingly felt the pull to move to regenerative practices, so he and his wife, lee, bravely opted to buy their own orchard to test out all the possibilities that were whirring around in chris’ head.

the halls consider the orchard a highly sensitive and sophisticated ecosystem rather than a monoculture.  while the overarching goal is being able to produce fruit with heightened nutrient density (flavour) and exceptional texture without chemical inputs, the mechanisms used to achieve this (while complex and many!) are predominantly related to soil health, the building of biodiversity and working to increase on farm resilience.

chris likens the overall process to trying to mimic what Mother Nature does naturally in her ‘whole ecosystem’ nutrient and carbon cycling. (see interview with Farmer's Footprint Australia) 

it’s a dance of observation and action, standing back and intervention … the question of how to achieve that perfect balance where everything is singing together.  don’t forget cherries are a once-a-year crop, so even with all those years of cumulative learnings, a year’s work culminates in a crop of a few weeks. 

in addition to cherries, the halls also run australian white sheep and harvest their own honey produced from hives originally brought in to pollinate the cherries.

chris is a humble, thoughtful grower who has been quietly collecting accolades along the way, including 2019 nsw farmer of the year. most recently the halls have been verified RegenGrown by Carbon8.

this will be the third season i’ve worked with chris and lee and it’s an honour to be able to offer their fruit to you again. in the many years i’ve been “sift-ing” it’s always true that the best people grow the best produce and chris and lee fit that description to a t.