About Us

Our Story

The Berry Dairy is a family-run farm café and strawberry experience in Maffra, Gippsland.

Located on our working dairy farm, we offer a licensed café with locally sourced Gippsland produce, pick your own strawberries, a petting zoo, playgrounds, and a providore store for foodie favourites. We’re also bike-friendly, just a short detour from the Gippsland Rail Trail with push bike parking on-site.

Owners Nicole and Brendan moved from New Zealand in 2018 and fell in love with Gippsland. After purchasing Mewburn Park Dairy Farm in 2022, they saw an opportunity to blend farming and tourism. What began as a small strawberry patch has grown into a thriving agritourism destination.

As a young family, we’ve created a space for everyone, from toddlers to grandparents, to enjoy fresh local food, connect with where it comes from, and have a whole lot of fun along the way.

Our Farm, Your Food

At The Berry Dairy, you can pick your own strawberries with sweeping views over our working dairy farm, home to 600 cows milked in a rotary dairy across 450 acres in Maffra, Gippsland.

Cows calve in winter and are milked twice daily until May, before enjoying a two-month break. All calves are reared on-site, heifers stay to join the herd, and bulls are sold to local beef producers. Some of our premium, lean, grass-fed dairy beef is used in our café menu and available to purchase.

We’re excited to share more of farm life soon, with farm tours and our Graze in the Paddock experience launching in 2027, stay tuned!

Our Spray-Free Strawberries

We’ve proudly planted over 20,000 spray-free strawberry plants across our fields, each one placed in the ground by hand. Our plants come from Toolangi Strawberry Growers and include mostly Albion and Cabrillo varieties, with smaller patches of Monterey and Petaluma. Which one will be your favourite?

Our strawberries fruit from late October through to May and remain productive for two seasons before being replaced. Grown right here in Gippsland, they’re the heart of everything we do, from pick your own to jams, sauces, and our famous fresh strawberry ice cream.

Local Flavour, Gippsland Proud

At The Berry Dairy, we’re proud to showcase the best of Gippsland. Over 90% of our menu is locally sourced, featuring produce and products from some of the region’s most passionate growers, makers, and artisans.

We serve Fat Cat Coffee Roasters beans paired with creamy Gippsland Jersey milk, and our platters feature award-winning cheeses from Maffra Cheese. You’ll find Trulli Bakery’s organic sourdough across our menu, from toasties and sandwiches to grazing boards.

Our Mewburn Park grass-fed beef, raised just across the paddock, stars in our burgers, lasagna, kabana and salami. We also showcase premium Rosedale Butchers products, Tarago olives, and delicate smoked trout from Narkoojee.

Our drinks menu is just as local, featuring wines from Narkoojee, Blue Gables, and Glenmaggie Wines, cider from Avon Ridge, beers from Maffco and Sailors Grave, and spirits from Infusa Distillery.

And of course, our signature strawberry ice cream is made fresh in front of you using strawberries grown right here on our farm. It doesn’t get more local than that!

Sustainable Strawberries, From Farm to Fork

At The Berry Dairy, sustainability is at the heart of everything we do, from how we grow our strawberries to how we serve your coffee.

We’re proud to operate with zero strawberry waste. Any berries that aren’t sold fresh are transformed into house-made products like our strawberry jam, or used in delicious local collaborations like Maffco’s strawberry sour beer and Infusa’s strawberry liqueur. Whatever’s left is happily enjoyed by our petting zoo animals, no berry goes to waste!

We’ve eliminated plastic packaging and all our takeaway cups and lids are fully biodegradable. Our irrigation water supply comes from recycled water used across the farm, making sure we utilise every drop. We’ve also planted a 150-meter native tree shelterbelt to support biodiversity and installed on-site beehives to help pollinate our crops and support healthy ecosystems.