Farming with a new flavour

BUSINESS GROWTH: Eveline van Bruegel and Steve Ord with one of the 300 pomegranate trees they planted last April. Picture: PETER MILLER

By PETER MILLER
Edenhope farmers Steve Ord and Eveline van Breugel are truly an innovative couple who are not afraid to aim left of centre – way left even.
The pair has ventured onto an enterprise unique to their area and to most of Australia for that matter.
They have planted 300 pomegranate trees on their 10-acre property which brushes the outskirts of the West Wimmera town. And if that’s not unique enough, the couple also breed dorper sheep.
Steve and Eveline are city folk whom had a yearning to try country life. Steve ran a successful installation business while Eveline was a business development executive for a major entertainment company.
They met 12 years ago and after spending several years together in Melbourne’s corporate world, they discovered a unified desire to change pace and try country life. The pair each wrote down a list of career choices they could consider and found the highest on the list for each was running a caravan park.
That’s how they ended up in Edenhope as the new owners of the Edenhope Lakeside Tourist Park. They bought the park at the height of the drought with a plan to sell after five years.
Eveline said they didn’t get off to a great start.
“There was so much work to do to fix it up because it was pretty run down and on the first day we put in at least 16 hours of work each and took one booking for the day,” Eveline said.
“So we made $20 for 32 hours of labour,” she laughed.
Drought breaker
They sold the caravan park true to their word, five years later and Eveline claims the day they signed it over, it started raining and the drought broke.
“We were happy though, we did what we said we would and turned it into a profitable business,” she said.
The pair then bought their rural property with its two-storey home and started breeding black-faced dorper sheep which are highly regarded in Melbourne’s leading restaurants for their low-fat meat. The sheep are a cross between a dorset ram and a Persian ewe and are registered as a breed of shedding sheep so they don’t need shearing because they shed their fleece naturally.
The couple bought a ram and six ewes at the end of 2010 and the flock has doubled in size since.

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Posted by Weekly Advertiser on Jan 25 2012. Filed under Community, Country Today, FEATURED. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry