Katie and Hugh Finlay are finding multiple ways to give back to their community

A desire to give back to their community while securing themselves financially prompted Katie and Hugh Finlay to build their business in central Victoria.

A desire to give back to their community while securing themselves financially led Katie and Hugh Finlay to build their business at Harcourt.

The couple run Grow Great Fruit, a training program helping others to grow their own fruit trees, built on the back of their experience growing produce in all conditions.

A third-generation orchardist, Katie moved back to the family farm in 1998 and took over the business from her father Merv soon after.

NEWS: Katie and Hugh Finlay at Harcourt Katie and Hugh Finlay at Harcourt run Grow Great Fruit at the Harcourt Organic farming Co-Op. Pictures: Zoe Phillips

The millennium drought and subsequent floods gave the couple a huge challenge, but also a wealth of knowledge.

“We were all learning how to grow fruit with not very much water … and then learnt lots about how to grow fruit trees in really wet conditions,” Katie said.

Losing their cherry orchard to flooding was almost one disaster too many, and after shortly considering getting out of farming, Katie and Hugh decided to stay, but also build an alternative income stream, in the form of Grow Great Fruit.

“The climate is getting more and more variable, so as farmers you can’t rely on having a good year every year or every second year, so it made sense to us to build in something as security,” Katie said.

“We’d also spent 20 years at farmers’ markets selling fruits, talking to backyard growers. So we felt really in touch with the sorts of problems that people have.”

Katie and Hugh with their dog Jedda.

In addition to Grow Great Fruit, Katie and Hugh also started the Harcourt Farming Co-Op on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in 2018, in a bid to improve a farming system that Katie said was broken.

“The bigger farms get and the more into monoculture, the more vulnerable they are to supply chains breaking down … and the further disconnected people get from where their food comes from,” Katie said.

“With the co-op, it’s very small scale, but very diverse. Diversity is the key to resilience.”

Katie and Hugh host a dairy, fruit tree nursery, orchard and a bush food patch on their property, with the co-op also providing the opportunity to make connections with young farmers who wanted to farm, and haven’t been able to access land due to prohibitive costs.