‘Is this what you really want to be doing?’ Why one man left the city for life on a sheep farm

Ian Belgiorno-Zegna can’t hide his excitement at finding new shoots in the paddock. Clearing away thick blades of grass, he cups his hands around a pair of tiny round leaves peeking through. “I sowed a cover crop for winter with 15 different species last week, and I wasn’t sure they were going to sprout because we haven’t had much rain since then,” he says. “These are beans, which are amazing for fixing nitrogen in the soil.”

Since buying his 17-hectare property, Elata Farm, near Mittagong in the NSW Southern Highlands four years ago, Belgiorno-Zegna, 40, has been on a steep learning curve as a lamb producer and one of a growing number of farmers passionate about regenerative agriculture practices that produce better quality food, avoid synthetic fertilisers and improve the land for future generations. Although he grew up in the city and studied engineering, Belgiorno-Zegna always knew that he wanted to farm. “I think it’s in my blood,” he says. “My mother’s family in Italy had farms.”

He was working as a development manager for a private corporation and living in eastern Sydney with a rooftop garden so abundant with edible and native plants that it featured on ABC’s Gardening Australia in 2019, after which he became serious about buying a farm. “COVID was an awakening, and then a close friend had a health scare. I asked myself, ‘Is this what you really want to be doing?’ ”

He adds, “A lot of my work was in the regions and I started looking in different areas, the Hunter Valley and further west; but when I found this property in the Southern Highlands, I knew it was the right place. It had established paddocks and trees and was next to public land with protected native forest. It’s 90 minutes from Sydney, which has turned out to be the biggest market for my meat and honey products, and I was warmly welcomed by my neighbours and the community.”

The scents of the Australian bush float on the breeze as we pass a dam, stained chocolate-brown by the tannin of melaleuca leaves, and stop in front of a towering gum, the farm’s namesake: a Eucalyptus elata tree. Otherwise known as a river peppermint gum, it has myriad branches thick with downward-facing leaves. Underneath it, Rambo, one of the farm’s four rams, looks diminutive, giving a sense of scale to the tree’s height.

To name the farm, Belgiorno-Zegna looked up the Trees Near Me NSW app and was immediately struck by Eucalyptus elata. “It’s Latin for ‘lofty’ or ‘raised up’, and in Italian, elata means ‘she is elated,’ which reminded me of my mother – who was overjoyed when we bought the farm. It’s easy to spell and pronounce, so I trademarked Elata Farm straight away.”

With his city rooftop experience, Belgiorno-Zegna had imagined growing vegetables or a crop as produce to sell. However, after researching suitable sheep breeds for his location, he bought eight Wiltipoll ewes and a ram from a breeder in the nearby township of Robertson as pets and to keep the grass low. “It wasn’t an idea for a business at first but then I had 13 lambs and the quality of the meat was phenomenal. I thought, ‘There might be something here.’ ”

Passionate about lifelong learning, “something I got from my family”, he read farming books and listened to podcasts such as The Regenerative Journey series by Charlie Arnott and Jill and Andrew Noble’s The Sheep Show Podcast. He says he had “naturally” found regenerative farming after watching a documentary. “The more I researched, the more convinced I was that it was the right move.”

Realising he needed new fences in order to implement adaptive grazing – moving the animals around the farm in sequences that optimise soil health – Belgiorno-Zegna took a two-day course at a Hunter Valley agricultural college. His sheep-safe fences are impressive. “My neighbour didn’t believe that I hadn’t brought in a professional,” he says. “I’m really a one-man band here. I do everything.”

Moonlighting as a goatherd on the escarpment in Robertson, I am a regenerative farmer, too, and I first met Belgiorno-Zegna at a small-ruminant workshop. We both ended up in a WhatsApp group for “Southern Highlands Growers, Farmers and Food Lovers”, an informal network set up last year. Many of us had been at a local screening of Rachel’s Farm, director Rachel Ward’s film about her own transformative journey from conventional to regenerative farming, a story that resonated deeply. The group now has 85 members from as far south as Braidwood, 160 kilometres away, and meets up every month or so at different pubs or farms.

“I felt like I’d found my tribe,” Belgiorno-Zegna says of the group. “We’re all different, but we have the same values.” In April, he met up with some of them at Yan Yan Gurt West Farm in Victoria’s Otway Ranges for Grounded Australia, an annual two-day festival for farmers, food producers and those curious about “better farming”.

Festival founder Matthew Evans is a chef turned farmer, presenter and author of seminal books including Soil and Milk. According to Evans, there’s a huge uptake in regenerative farming worldwide. He held the first Grounded festival at his farm in Tasmania in 2024 having been inspired by Groundswell, a similar festival in the UK which attracted more than 10,000 people last year.

“What is interesting is that the audience for Grounded in Australia skews way younger and more female than what people would expect at a farming conference,” says Evans. “I’ve had people at Grounded say to me, ‘Where are the farmers?’ And while there are old white men who have been doing great things for decades, most of our audience is younger. These are the people who will make the changes we need to restore the soil and stabilise our food systems so we can grow food into the future.”

Instead of imported, urea-based fertilisers, regenerative farmers use mostly local products and methods – soil-testing, cover crops, compost, adaptive grazing – to increase and maintain fertility in the soil. The aim is to encourage good bacteria and fungi, the “biology” of the soil, to activate chemical processes which make precious elements such as nitrogen and phosphorus available to plants without the need for synthetic additives. With the fallout from the conflict in the Middle East threatening the livelihoods of many farmers, Evans noticed a few smug faces at Grounded: “regen” farmers who rely on zero or minimal imported fertiliser.

This year, more than 800 attended Grounded, which featured presentations by 80 farmers, scientists and industry leaders, and hands-on “walkshops” and demonstrations. Each festival acknowledges the wisdom of First Nations people, who have practised landscape regeneration for millennia.

Working with nature rather than against it is a regenerative principle, but Belgiorno-Zegna was worried after building beautiful new fences across the farm: resident wombats were digging trenches underneath them and creating escape routes for his lambs, which would then be stranded from their mothers and vulnerable to predators. After experimenting with a piece of wood and wire, he installed a door that a wombat could push through, but not a lamb.

In April, he celebrated a year in business selling boxed lamb, honey and beeswax lip balm, and says he can’t keep up with demand. He now sells beef and lamb from other like-minded producers on the WhatsApp group.

Katrina Sparke – her mum is the noted nutritionist Rosemary Stanton – has grown award-winning meat at Redleaf Farm in nearby Fitzroy Falls since moving from Sydney 18 years ago, choosing heritage breeds such as Scottish Highland cattle, Wessex Saddleback pigs and Border Leicester-cross sheep. “Ian came to see how we farm and is now selling our lamb,” she says. “I love the way our community works together.”

As “Farmer Ian”, Belgiorno-Zegna’s new life has also enabled him to truly embrace his first name. “My family all have Italian names – my dad is Marco, my brother Vito – and I was stuck with this ‘Ian’ name. I always felt that it didn’t sit right but since I’ve moved to the Highlands, the gentleman at Mitre 10 is called Ian, the guy that delivers the gas bottles is Ian. Suddenly, I’m surrounded by all these Ians and I feel like I’m in my zone.”

Not taking a salary while he focuses on growing his business and excluding the cost of the land, Belgiorno-Zegna has forecast making a modest profit in his third year. “I wouldn’t rely on the farm to generate an income immediately,” he says. “Having an alternative source of income, as I do and many other farmers I speak with, helps take the pressure off during the learning phase.”

His advice for city dwellers dreaming of making a similar move? It helps to be curious, resilient and comfortable solving problems, he says. “Farming is hard work, costly and frequently unpredictable … There is always something that needs attention – whether it’s sick animals, fencing, weather, or machinery issues, it can be stressful.” But, he adds, coupled with the sense of community, “being able to feed people with a product I’m immensely proud of is very rewarding.”

Beyond the fence, a colony of straw-necked ibis peck around the pasture. “They’re known as farmers’ friends,” he says. “They eat insects that feed on crops and leave good fertiliser behind. If you look closely, you’ll see there’s one regular ibis with them too, a ‘bin chicken’.” He laughs. “Choosing farm life over the city. I can relate to that.”

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