When Leanne Crofts and her partner, Brendan Sheldrick told family they were packing up their inner-city Melbourne life and moving to a farm in Eugowra to raise game birds in the New South Wales’ central west, they said they were crazy.
And while their resolve has been tested by the floods that tore havoc on their local community, as well as COVID, which saw the market for their game bird business close overnight, they have emerged stronger than ever and can’t see themselves moving from the place they now call home.
“We all know now that we can’t predict the future”, Leanne says, “but this is what we see ourselves doing.
“My hope is that we open more stores and have more produce coming off our farm.
“But it is one step along each way. We just have to do it step by step.”
It is this philosophy, putting one foot in front of the other, as well as their shared love of food and where it comes from, that has seen Leanne and Brendan make the move to the country and build a life and successful business that embraces family, food, and community.
A far cry from their lives back in 2016, living in Melbourne, when Leanne says they were both “really stressed out and wanted a different lifestyle”.
“We were literally looking for something else in our lives that we weren’t getting in the city.”
Prompting them to throw in their jobs, Leanne in knitwear production management and Brendan, as head chef of a two hatted restaurant in Melbourne’s bustling Southbank, Leanne says the move was “very out of our comfort zones”.
“It was one of the scariest things having to quit your job and not having another job to go to,” she says.
Making the initial move to Corop on the Victorian-New South Wales border, where they spent a year working on a farm, Leanne says the idea for a gamebird farm first arose when they saw one on the market and attempted to buy it.
“We thought it was a good business idea and that we could do our own gamebird farm,” she says.
Dropping a “pin on the map”, Leanne says they started looking for “the closest property we could afford that would get us out of the city and able to do what we were hoping to do on our property”.
“That’s literally how we ended up in Eugowra,” she says, with the couple making the move in early-2017 to establish their award-winning game bird business, Eugowra Game Birds.
Growing birds, pheasants, and quail for high-end restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne, Leanne says COVID saw their market disappear overnight.
“COVID put an end to it,” she says.
“Because we were supplying all the restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne and COVID closed them down, we lost our market within the space of about three days. It was very abrupt.”
Leanne says this saw them shift their production system to predominately chickens, with Brendan making deliveries to retail and private customers all through Sydney, “because everyone wanted to eat at home”.
“However, once the COVID restrictions opened up the first time, Sydney didn’t need us anymore,” she says.
Turning their attention to the local area, where they had already taken up an old butcher shop in nearby Forbes, they went from being a pick-up point for online orders to opening a shop front, Sheldricks Fine Food, selling Brendan’s pre-prepared meals.
“We have pivoted and pivoted and pivoted until we finally found something that’s COVID-proof,” Leanne explains.
“It’s different to what we thought it would be in the beginning. We thought it would be a proper butcher shop and sell lots of fresh cuts of meat and everything.
“But everyone just wants Brendan’s cooking because they have cottoned on to the fact he is a pretty good chef.”
Leanne says the business, which allows Brendan to “cook whatever he wants, whenever he wants as long as he includes some of our classics”, has proved to be “more profitable than game bird farming”.
“The business has been born out of our customers basically telling us what they want,” she says, “and us being humble enough to listen to that during COVID.”
Leanne who runs the front of shop and sales says that they know all their customers by name, something that is “really rare in retail”.
“It has given us that ability, that avenue to connect with our community, which has been really nice. And to connect with our customers.”
That community spirt, Leanne says, came to the fore during last year’s devastating November floods, which saw thousands evacuated and homes and farms cut off for weeks.
“We were cut off from our shop for quite a while, but our home was safe in Eugowra,” she says.
Wanting to help their community and get back up and running after losing all their stock, Leanne says the idea to run an online campaign where people could donate a meal was born.
“We ran an online campaign and asked people to buy a meal for people who were flood affected,” she says, “and it went global.”
With over 4500 meals purchased, Leanne says it was “like the whole world was coming together saying we support you, we see you, and we want to make you a lasagna.
“We had people taking meals on helicopters to areas that were still cut off and couldn’t get food, on tractors through floodwater, fire trucks. It was pretty epic on everyone’s behalf.”
While it was something Leanne hopes they never have to all live through again, she says it “really made you see the good side of people”.
Now that life has settled down from the floods, and the couple are back to juggling the shop, the farm and their two young children, Leanne says she still feels life is “less stressed” and “more real” than it was in the city.
“People ask me would you guys move back to the city,” she says. “Absolutely not. I can’t even imagine what would force us back into the city.”
Leanne says while they like to visit and miss having “the restaurants and all those things literally at your doorstep”, she feels “more connected to people and more in tune with myself and with my family”.
“And I am definitely happier.
“That’s what you aim for and that’s why we did what we did and moved here.”
