We receive a lot of enquiries so we ask you please check out our frequently asked questions below before getting in touch.
For all postal enquiries, letters or packages can be sent to us at:
P.O. Box 85
Wyong, NSW
Australia 2259
We’ve often been asked how The Farm came about. You can watch Luke’s story here.
Over the years the farm has grown into something even bigger. With hundreds of thousands of Farm Fans on Facebook and YouTube we now try to share a slice of the joy with the rest of the world.
We often get visited by media and TV shows to come check out what we are doing. With the recent shift to re-training and re-socialising abandoned shelter dogs we are more busy and excited than ever.
The joy and success we’ve had at helping these dogs is one of the many reasons we continue to improve The Farm every day.
Once a week on Wednesday’s a full bus of dogs who were previously a part of the DDFT pack, come up to the farm for a day of fun and also help some shelter dogs with socialisation at the same time.
It looks similar. But it’s not. The focus is now on providing positive social opportunities for the shelter dogs NOT on sticking to a full and inflexible schedule of intense activities. Daycare days were a paid service, Therapy Days are now free for the pack, no charge. It’s our gift to them for helping, our commitment to the shelter dogs AND we feel we had to, so that we could alleviate the expectations of a Daycare Day. The old schedule didn’t give us the ability to provide a social program that would benefit all the shelter dogs.
There are two packs frequenting the farm fortnightly. So each week there will be a different pack coming up on a Wednesday. The Therapy Dogs are dogs selected from the DDFT pack. They were carefully selected for their varying traits and temperament to help the shelter dogs. Not every DDFT dog was suitable to help the shelter dogs.
All the other days of the week we are training the shelter dogs and socialising them with our pack, in preparation for Therapy Day and of course life off the farm in hopefully their forever home one day. However, a larger pack with many dogs of different size, breed, age, personality and energy level, gives us the ability to expand their social experiences, increase their desensitisation and set them up for a better chance of success. The Therapy Pack are no ordinary group of dogs, it’s a pack that has been 6 years in training. They’re highly social, very responsive to our training and rules, they work as a pack and follow our lead. They’re very good role models and can help dogs that haven’t been given the social opportunities or guidance in so many ways.
Yes and No. Therapy Days will be guided by where each shelter dog is in their development. Initially, it will be socialisation sessions like this one. Each shelter dog muzzled or not muzzled, on lead or off lead OR not at the level of taking part at all, like Chance today. He’s not going to benefit from the larger pack at this stage, he is better off doing more intimate social sessions and building up again. Down the track, we imagine there will be days that lure coursing will be re-introduced for shelter dogs to participate who are at that high level, if they make it there. But not beforehand. Just the same as “when will their muzzles come off?” … when and if they’re ready. We will always be over cautious on the time a dog wears a muzzle around other dogs. They need to reach a series of high markers in reliability to be granted that trust. Remember Shadow? She wore one for months and months.
We have a dedicated group of members and supporters in our behind the scenes and training academy who pay a monthly subscription for extra videos (to join there is a button to join on our YouTube homepage only visible supposedly from a desktop computer 🤔). But, really a lot of them simply want to support what we’re doing. Their help is the biggest of all and honestly pays for most of the costs. We are very grateful for their support in allowing us to help these dogs that are in our care now, in the past and those in the future. We also earn money from our YouTube channel from watching our videos and watching some adverts now and then. We want to thank you very much for continuing to view and support us. We couldn’t do this without you all.
We can only help a few dogs at a time, but little by little, a little becomes a lot. And that’s only with the help of you all. So a very big thank you from us to you.
And please like and subscribe to our YouTube channel, we’ve not ever asked but we would like to as we need it now more than ever. Thank you 🙏
Unfortunately we cannot accept visitors to the farm due to restrictions put on us by the local council. On rare occasions we apply for event permits, such as our annual Christmas party, which allows us to have visitors for one day only.
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Working at the Farm is a lot of fun but it also takes a lot of experience and training.
We unfortunately can't offer any volunteer or work experience placements. We are currently not set up to train people to be on-site as this takes a few months to achieve.
If we ever have placements available for full time work at the Farm we'll announce these on all our social media channels.
Luke was Special Forces in the military for 11 years before starting his career with dogs. We first began as a dog walking and dog training business in Sydney. Initially walking dogs and then expanding to have staff walk and Luke training full time. Luke trained many dogs with many different issues but his specialty were dogs on their last chance, some on death row, dogs that were aggressive.
After several years of walking and training we made the move to start the farm. The farm was an idea we had after walking city dogs for years and seeing that an hour walk in the park wasn’t enough for them. We also found that on occasions dog parks were not a safe place and also not a great influence on a dogs behaviour.
We moved to our first farm in 2016 and set up a basic playground on a secure 12 acres. Opening our doors in March 2017. We started with just 4-6 dogs a day and only operating 3 days a week, with no staff just a husband and wife team.
In June 2018 we moved to our current property, 32 acres in Jilliby. We replaced all the old farm fencing with new 6 foot fences, underground anti dig systems and snake mesh. We cleaned up every inch of the property. We built the playground and worked hard improving the ground surface by removing bindis, weeds and laying new turf to create the soft lush paddocks we have today. In 2019 we installed the pool, a 260,000 litre magnesium dog dock diving pool.
While we would love to share the Farm with everyone, we can't hire it out for events. The Farm is being used at all times by our Doggy Day Care guests and on the very rare occasion it's quiet we're busy doing maintenance and improvements for the following week.
We are in Jilliby NSW Australia. Jilliby is a rural suburb on the Central Coast. The Central Coast is approximately an hour north of Sydney CBD and is known for its beautiful beaches and relaxed lifestyle.
It's our vision that dogs from all over the world should get a chance to enjoy a Farm Trip. But, for now, we're not in a position to be able to share what we've learnt so people can build their own farms – but it is something we are wanting to do. Please keep in touch by following us on our social media channels.
When we're ready and able we'll put together a comprehensive guide so that there'll be Doggy Day Care Farm trips from Canada to Cameroon.
In short no.
The long version is while we have never had a fight we have had dogs show signs of anti social behaviour. This can be overly rough play, an aggressive bark or even a nip while chasing for a ball.
Our overall approach to aggression is focused on prevention. With our transition to rehabilitating some very aggressive dogs we have taken many precautions to continue this approach.
Happiness for all our guest is our top priority. Which is why we have such a detailed enrolment process.
Our overall approach to behaviour is to focused on prevention. To learn more about how we create a wonderful, fun environment for all our guest read more in detail here.
We have 12 dogs of our own. Joey the Kelpie, Cutie Pie the Pug and Tilly the 6 year old Red Heeler. Tilly used to be a day care dog who’s owner sadly passed away from cancer. A week before she passed she asked ask to have Tilly. Tilly has lived at the farm, in our family ever since. We now also have many ex-shelter dogs we have adopted ourselves.
Swimming activities at the Farm are only for our dogs. The facilities are not open to the public or available for hire.
No not yet. We have plans to heat the pool.
We do less water sports and more bush runs, bush walks, paddock races and lure coursing. Activities that are better in the cooler weather or wet weather and not great in the hot weather.
We have 4-6 people at the farm
If your enquiry has not already been answered above then please try asking a question under one of our YouTube or Facebook posts. Our community have been with us from the beginning and often help each other out with questions about the farm. Thank you for your interest and support.