SARAH

I’m a New Zealander. I moved to Australia for six months with my parents, Julie and Lewis Robins, when I was 12. We travelled a lot to see what Australia was like and stayed. When I first left my teaching job in Sydney and moved out here, I had a big vegetable garden and I’d look at what James was growing and ask him why we didn’t eat what we grew — our own wheat, chickpeas, lentils. We’d travelled in Italy and seen how people there ate food that was produced in their own region. Why were we buying chickpeas? Part of my interest is inspired by the growing. Both James and I have science degrees and are into the challenge. We ask lots of questions: Can we source the seed? Can we grow it? Will it grow well here? What do we need to do to improve on that? One of the biggest things I’ve learnt since moving from the city to the country is about seasonality. When I first arrived, I used to say that I didn’t like lamb. Eating our own lamb, it became apparent that I liked new-season lamb, but didn’t really like the taste associated with an older lamb. That’s why we only sell new-season spring lamb. I wouldn’t eat an avocado out of season, so I don’t want to sell a lamb out of season. In this supermarket age, no-one knows this anymore. We talked about selling the food we grew direct to customers for a long time, then one day James saw a refrigerated van for sale. We decided that if we were going to do it, we had to go all in. Once we’d worked through selling the lamb, which was our first step, we realised we could do it with all the food we grew. We wanted it to be a part of the family farming business, not going against what we did, which came down to our food philosophy around seasonality. It was a risk, only selling new-season lamb when a customer can buy it from the supermarket year-round. Why would they want to buy from us? Thankfully, they do. We started selling to friends and family, and that circle has grown wider as we’ve gone along. We’ve grown at the rate we’ve been capable of growing, which has been nice. >