Sam Vincent was working as a freelance journalist in Canberra when his mother called to say his father had suffered an accident on the family farm.
Sam's father, Dave Vincent, had got his hand caught in a woodchipper.
"The woodchipper incident was just the latest in a long list of accidents … he was quite reckless in the way that he'd just throw himself at jobs on the land," Sam recalled.
"But the woodchipper incident was really the final straw."
While his father kept his hand, the incident prompted a family discussion about the future of the farm.
"I think we'd all just been putting it off. I'd definitely never considered farming in my future, I just thought that my dad would always be a farmer and my mum would always be helping out on the farm as well," Sam said.
"But I think this is the way it goes with a lot of farming families, they need a crisis to start a conversation about succession, it's otherwise a subject that farmers find pretty hard to talk about."
While he grew up on the property with his three older sisters and spent plenty of time outdoors playing make-believe games in the bush, Sam never displayed any interest in helping his parents with the farm work.
So, it was quite a mindset shift for the then 29-year-old to start working part-time with this father on the 263-hectare property known as Gollion, just over the ACT border near Sutton in the Yass Valley.
"I only started working with him to keep him out of harm's way, I literally didn't want another phone call from my mum saying something even worse than him mangling his hand in a woodchipper had occurred," Sam said.
"Gradually, as we kept working together, it became an apprenticeship, a succession."
Fences come down
As the pair started fencing the farm together, the fences between the two men began coming down.
"We became much closer," Sam said.
"It's not like we had all these conversations in the paddock — there was so much shared non-communicative activity. And there's this knowledge transfer that's passing from him to me and he'd tell little stories about what it was like here when he started farming.
"There were parts of his life that I learnt that just came out while we were working together on the farm. It was a really rich time."
The unofficial apprenticeship went on for six years, with Sam working seven-days a week to juggle his writing, work as a research assistant at the Australian National University, and time on the farm.
His coverage of the David Eastman retrial saw him awarded a Walkley in 2019, but it was the reward he got from planting his own fig orchard that set his life in a new direction.
"Walking through it [the fig orchard] today, I feel a great sense of satisfaction, that this is something on the farm that I've done," he said.
"I think this was really the instigator for me to have a sense of ownership and really buy into the future of the farm and its wellbeing."
He started to see the land in a whole new light, and moved back to the farm in 2019 before his parents officially retired and moved to the NSW South Coast the following year.
Sam had gone from being uninterested in farming, to working full-time as a cattle and fig farmer.
Regenerative farming revitalises landscape
When Sam's father bought the farm in 1983, he set out to regenerate the overgrazed land and what he termed its "crap soil".
Dave continued to work full-time as an economist in Canberra while he and Sam's mother, Jane, planted thousands of trees and implemented regenerative agricultural practices such as rotational grazing.
Nearly 40 years on, the fruits of their labour can be seen. Where there were once bare paddocks, there are now flourishing grasses, native trees, orchards and a flowing creek.
"Dad's belief is that sustainability is the bare minimum," Sam explained.
"He likened it to treading water: if you are not doing further damage then that is sustainable, you're not going backwards but neither are you going forwards and improving what was there.
"So, he's taught me about regenerative agriculture … and we're trying to recover what was lost, improving the soil, improving the function of creeks, composting a lot, planting a lot of trees."
Sam has adopted the same regenerative farming principles and has studied holistic farm management.
"Regenerative farming is a paradigm shift, it's about judging your success not so much on productivity — although that is obviously nice — but instead on outcomes," he said.
"This could be outcomes for the soil, the landscape, the biodiversity, the birds that you see, the health of the people that are eating your food, the health of the community.
"I see farming as managing a landscape more than producing fruit or cattle. That's a pretty wholesome thing to do, and it makes you feel very fulfilled spiritually."
The farm is now Sam's primary source of income and he has developed a strong connection to the landscape around him.
"To me, Gollion is the part of the world that I know so well now, I miss it so much when I'm away from here," he said.
"It's a place I can navigate in any direction in the dark, it's really nearly an extension of my body."
Ochre quarry provides further links to the land
As Sam's interest in the farm grew, he wanted to learn more about its history and how Indigenous people used the land thousands of years earlier.
He enlisted the help of Canberra archaeologist and friend Dave Johnston, who recognised an ochre quarry where the family had simply seen a bald hill.
In 2019, the site, known as Derrawa Dhaura, was protected as an Aboriginal Place by the New South Wales government.
"In that process, Dave brought out lots of elders from the Ngambri and Ngunnawal communities," he said.
"That was a real highlight of my farming career so far, learning about how the land used to be used … establishing this connection and letting the Ngambri and Ngunnawal communities use this site as they see fit.
"It's a way of recognising that my family is just the custodians of these 650 acres for the time that we're here, but this relationship goes back thousands of thousands of years.
"Hopefully by having it listed as an Aboriginal Place we're safeguarding it for the future."
'No distinction between life and work'
Sam has combined his love of writing and farming in a book, My Father and Other Animals, which he describes as a "love letter to my dad", chronicling his transition to life on the farm.
And now a father himself, he is intent on combining farming with parenting his five-month-old daughter, Orlando.
"I have baby Orlando on my chest, we've built a fence together already," he said.
"When she wakes up at 7:00am I take her for a walk with me for an hour and that's when we check the cattle … and she loves the white noise of the mooing and the birds and the trees.
"I really love that there's not really a distinction between my life and my work, and having Orly in that mix is working beautifully."
