26/08/2026
🚜👨🌾 Mid-week Farm Updates 👨🌾🚜
Hope you’re all having a great week!
Work continues rolling on at Petrichor. Pretty standard this week with nothing out of the ordinary rearing its head (but I’ve said it now 🤣😅)
I thought I’d do something a little different this week and tell everyone a little about myself (Ben), considering theres not really any exciting news at the farm this week and as some of you know, my journey to setting up Petrichor has been a little unusual.
My first career was in aviation. For roughly 10 years, in my early twenties, I flew planes and helped manage a charter company up in Katherine in the NT, where I flew around and lived in some very remote places including Gove and Groote Eylandt. We had around 25 aircraft, 20 pilots and transported a few hundred passengers all across the NT and North Queensland every week. Wet season in the territory can be pretty full on and was generally quite a stressful time as a pilot and chief pilot, being responsible for the safety of your fellow pilots and the organisation as a whole. I have countless memories and stories of racing weather, including coordinating 10+ of our own aircraft to evacuate 300+ residents out of one community in the path of a cyclone, a few near misses, nearly getting murdered on two seperate occasions, (turns out pilots become targets for all sorts of reasons in remote NT communities), and plenty of incredible views of the NT from the air that are impossible to capture in just words. I met so many incredible people, including my neighbour (now my beautiful wife hehe) and have so many fond memories of that period of my life. After 10 years, the second half of which I was legally responsible for the operation of entire company, the stress started taking a toll on my mental and later my physical health, to the point where I could no longer fly and had to consider a different career pathway.
Throughout those years many hours were spent waiting at airports, and during this spare time I had decided to feed my interest in computers, programming and application design/development by teaching myself programming. This evolved to the point where I was able to roll it into my second career, working in various roles including wproduct manager in an aviation software company, and a similar role in a mining company. After a few years in these roles full time I found myself dreading spending the entire day stuck inside an office and knew I had to make another change.
I’d grown up on the farm here in Samford and had spent time on remote cattle stations, so always had part of me that loved working/being on the land. Hence Petrichor was born from this yearning of a more balanced lifestyle. I dropped back to 4 days a week at my software job to start setting up the farm. I had no idea what a market garden was, (I had to look it up), and had no idea how to grow organic vegetables at scale. I watched YouTube videos to learn, was steered in the right direction by an awesome fellow farmer, and did and still do learn a huge amount from trial and error. Pretty soon I realised how much I loved working on the farm, and that I simply couldn’t balance the demands of both jobs, so I made the difficult (and scary) decision to resign from my software job, jump, and put everything I had into running the farm. A special thanks here to my beautiful wife who wholeheartedly supported my decision, even though it seemed pretty crazy at the time!
It’s been over 12 months now of building and running Petrichor and whilst it’s certainly challenging at times, I couldn’t be happier. The decisions I’ve made allow me to spend time with our now 10 month old daughter every day, and bring her up in an environment where she can learn how to grow healthy food and look after the land. I have even now been able to devote some time and energy to getting some of my own software and hardware projects off the ground and help build some other software projects and companies with business partners.
So yes, that’s my story so far I guess.
If you’re stuck in a job or career which is seriously affecting your mental and physical health, or you’re on the precipice of whether to go all in on something you’ve created, I say go for it. This life doesn’t reward career loyalty quite like it used to (in my opinion).
Anyway, I hope my story resonates with someone to help facilitate a change, or at the very least has given you something to read for a few minutes in your day 🙂
Ok, enough of me, back to the farm!
This week at our farmgate stall (every Sunday from 7:30am - 10:00am, at 128 Camp Mountain Road, Samford, cash and card accepted) we are aiming to have the following freshly harvested (from 2am Sunday morning), spray free, organically grown produce:
- Rocket
- Mizuna
- Spinach
- Mustard Lime
- Sorrel
- Cos Lettuce
- Salad Bowl Lettuce
- Butterhead Lettuce
- Kale
- Spring Onion
- Rainbow Chard/Silverbeet
- Golden Chard/Silverbeet
- Giant Mustard Leaves
- Radish
- Tokyo Turnips
- Carrots
- Beetroot
- Cherry Tomatoes
- Snow Peas
- Cauliflower
- Basil
- Thyme
- Oregano
- Dill
- Parsley
- Cumquats
- Beautiful Locally produced honey by Taroma Raw Honey
We are in the process of finding a fill in coffee van as our regular one is unable to make it. So hopefully we will have coffee also!
All our produce is grown here on the farm and is truly local produce. You won’t find fresher produce that lasts for weeks in your fridge!
We wouldn’t be here, and I wouldn’t be able to tell my story like I have above without the incredible support from our beautiful community. Thankyou so much to everyone who visits us, especially our regulars. We can’t wait to see you on Sunday and otherwise wish you a smashing end to the week and start to the weekend!
Ben, Lucy and the Petrichor Farm Team
