About Us
Holly's Homestead started as a simple idea between two people who'd had enough of the treadmill.
We're Holly and James Fisher, and like a lot of families right now, we found ourselves worn down by the pace of it all — the commute, the bills that never seemed to stop climbing, the sense that we were working harder each year just to stay in the same place. Inflation kept biting, the noise kept getting louder, and somewhere in the middle of it we looked at each other and asked a pretty simple question: is this actually the life we want for our children?
The answer was no. So we started working towards something different — a quieter, more self-sufficient life, off the grid, growing our own food, raising our own animals, and building the kind of home where our kids grow up connected to where their food actually comes from, not just what's on a supermarket shelf.
We're not third-generation farmers with land passed down through the family, and we're not writing this from the other side of a finished homestead. We're still building towards it, learning as we go. But we're not starting from nothing either, and it's worth explaining why.
We both currently work at Woolworths, Australia's largest supermarket chain, and between us that's brought a useful kind of experience to what we're building here. Holly has spent 15 years at store level, deep in the day-to-day reality of food handling and storage — stock rotation, cold chain, shelf life, the practical detail of keeping food safe from delivery through to sale — backed by years of internal training on proper food handling practice. James has spent 14 years in warehousing, immersed in the same world from the supply side: best-practice food handling at scale, and a solid working grounding in HACCP, the food safety standards the industry runs on for identifying and controlling risk at every step. On top of that, James grew up with hands-on cattle farming experience on a family farm — not a hobby paddock, but actual stock work — and spent a further 15 years working in the pet and produce industry, which has given him a broad, practical grounding in animal care across a wide range of species.
None of that makes us professional farmers. But it does mean that when we write about storing a harvest properly, keeping a coop clean, choosing the right setup for a new animal, or handling meat safely after a slaughter, it's not just something we read about last week — it's informed by years spent around food safety and animal care across a wide range of species in a professional setting, not just a homesteading forum.
Holly's Homestead is where we're writing all of that down, alongside everything else we're learning as we go — reading, researching, testing things, getting some of it wrong, and figuring out what actually works for an Australian climate rather than repeating advice written for somewhere else entirely. Partly for us, one organised place to keep track of what we've learned, instead of it being scattered across notebooks and bookmarked tabs. And partly because when we went looking for this kind of practical, no-nonsense, Australia-specific guidance ourselves, we couldn't find much of it in one place. So we're building the resource we wished existed when we started.
If you're standing where we were — tired of the noise, thinking about what matters, wanting something more grounded for your family — we hope this helps get you there a little faster than it's taken us.