The young farmers rewriting life on the land

By Earth to Sea News · 29 July 2026

Buffalo dairies, soil first grazing, and a country school where the classroom is a working farm.

At Mypolonga in South Australia, Mollie and Corey Jones looked at the family dairy and decided it needed to become something else. It is now the South Australian Buffalo Company, the only operation of its kind in the state, milking up to two hundred buffalo a day for cheesemakers across South Australia, and running on solar power, efficient irrigation, rotational grazing and its own composting. In order to build something profitable and lasting, Mollie says, they needed to diversify. Nearby, Mel Thomson's family orchard has been on the same ground since 1985 and now turns surplus fruit into dried products rather than waste, because sustainability, as she puts it, is about making sure the land and the business can carry on for the next lot.

Further south at Penola, David Galpin farms country his family has held for more than a century, and he has taken it off synthetic fertilisers altogether. We do not use any chemicals, he says. We look after the soil and the soil looks after us. The farm now welcomes visitors too, with accommodation and guided tours, which is its own kind of crop. And the thread running through all of it is the one that matters most for the next hundred years: at Penola High School, agriculture is taught with livestock, cropping, aquaculture and viticulture, using the same technology the farms outside the window are using. Country skills are being handed on deliberately, to people who want them.