Canturf's owner Nat Davy brought the farm 12 years ago from dairy farmer Sandy Stuart who with his wife Brenda had milked 170 Holstein cows on the property, previously called 'Glenholme'.

National Trust ACT spokesman on heritage issues Eric Martin said the loss of the dairy was sad. "It was an operating dairy farm since the 1920s. It just wasn't viable so they ended up having to sell it. It was a crying shame, because it was the only business that continued to supply a primary product like milk to Canberra from the 1920s."

The Land newspaper reported the dairy's closure was keenly felt, after being in the Stuart family since 1947.

"A couple drove in yesterday with tears in their eyes, saying they loved driving through here seeing the cows," Mr Stuart had said at the time.

Milking dairy cows has long stopped, but pre-dawn production grinds on with turf harvesting beginning about 2am and continuing until the sun rises, says Canturf's Fyshwick manager Andy Middleton.

"We don't mind starting early, it is nice and quiet. We can get a lot of our turf harvesting done before the sun comes up and at least our customers are guaranteed it doesn't get any fresher than that."

Because it is on a flood plain the farm does not face a threat of redevelopment. The last two major floods posed the biggest threat to the turf enterprise.

"It was a lot of sleepless nights when the floods were on over those two wet summers," Mr Middleton said. "It was pretty hairy seeing what came down the river – big piles of willows, logs and all sorts of floating debris."

"We had removed all the pumps from the river and taken out all the flushing lines."

When the sky cleared they found, despite two of the wettest years since records were taken, flood water had not encroached onto the farm.

"We have to be careful when and what we pump. The water is quite salty, so we have made a switch in recent years to a carp-based fertiliser," Mr Middleton said.

"This means we don't have to water the granular fertilisers in, we can apply fertiliser via a boom spray. We don't have to be irrigating in the saltier water and causing more harm to the soil over time."

Mr Davy had secured a 600-megalitre water licence, 1.8 kilometres of river frontage, three metres of topsoil across the property and a high-profile location next to the Monaro Highway to promote his business.

But sadness was not far for the Davy family either. Months after the deal Mr Davy, 33, crashed his Cessna 182 while attempting to land at his family's private air strip in Bungendore. A passenger was killed and he died later that year.