SUSTAINABILITY

The Sustainability Story for Cupitt’s Estate

At Cupitt’s Estate, our aim is to run a sustainable business and to make a lasting impact on our community with minimal impact on our environment. We aspire to lead, educate, create awareness and influence others about the practice of environmental and food sustainability. Our founder Rosie Cupitt is the leader of Slow Food South Coast and is actively involved with this sustainability group on a local and global level, ensuring that our business is on the forefront of change of practice and distribution of knowledge.

Our Sustainability Story is always evolving as we strive to be and do better. Although we’re always looking ahead, here are some of the ways we are practicing sustainability now.

We Grow Our Own Food

Our Farm and Garden Team maintain the ecosystem of our kitchen garden. Sustainability is a value that underpins everything we do. Our Garden Manager, Gavin, is one of our biggest advocates, consistently moving us forward in this space. Our garden is immensely diverse. Offering this level of diversity hasn’t been an easy feat, with organic pest control and soil management strategies changing rapidly compared to a commercial farm, it’s important that the species of veggies and fruits we plant can work cohesively together both in-season and across seasons.

Our chefs work in collaboration with our Garden Team to strategise how to bring you the best possible seasonal menus with the most nutrient dense, delicious produce that hold little to no carbon foot print. If we can’t grow it, our chefs source as much of our produce as close as possible to the restaurant, minimising the distance that it must be transported.

“How food is grown and where it comes from links directly to the sustainability and climate issues we are collectively facing” Adrian explains. The world’s food system is responsible for almost a quarter of the greenhouse gases that are warming our planet each year. Between growing & harvesting the plants and animals needed to grow our food, plus the transport & packaging it takes to distribute it, there has never been a more important time to change the way we consume, purchase & grow food.

We’re proud of what we have achieved here at Cupitt’s Estate, but we have big ambitions when it comes to developing our sustainable business even more, and our paddock to plate story is just the beginning.

Sustainable Food Waste Management

Blessed with a range of organic waste material our aim has been to formalise an Organics Recycling Program at Cupitt’s Estate, capturing 100% of generated waste to be converted into HUMUS, aka bloody good soil.

Like any business, we produce waste with most of our offerings, it’s just the nature of being producers. What we do differently however, is make our waste work for us & our community.

Beer grain used in the brewing process is used to feed our cattle. Whey from our fromagerie (cheese making facility) is donated to local Martins Ridge farm to feed their pig livestock. We use our old wine barrels to smoke cheese & meats for our kitchen. All of our food scraps from the kitchen, & winery are transformed through 3 main humus (or soil) creating systems.

1: WORMS: We have 5 commercial size worm farms creating nutrient dense, biologically inoculated worm castings that go into each new planting.

2: FEATHERED FRIENDS: Our Chickens and Ducks are fed food scraps and beer grain converting them into manures.

3: COMPOST: We have 1 large scale system + 2 smaller composting bay systems.

Practicing sustainability with food is one of the easiest ways you can make immediate changes to reduce your carbon footprint at home. We hope you feel inspired to look at how you can practice food sustainability at home, if you’re looking to be inspired & follow our sustainability story, subscribe to our newsletter here.

Your Waste, Our Water

Perhaps the most exciting recent development for us in the sustainability space is the construction of our on-site water treatment plant, where we transform industrial waste from our production facilities, and domestic waste from our visitors & guests and turn it into water that is reused to nourish our land and start the growing process all over again.

If you’re interested in staying up to date with our Sustainability Story, or want to receive tips from our experts on how you can make changes yourself at home,subscribe to our newsletter here.

Cupitt’s won Excellence in Sustainability in the 2018 Shoalhaven Business Awards.