I grew up on a dairy farm in northern Victoria and when I was 17 I decided I didn’t want to be a farmer. I left the farm and went and studied business management and marketing.

I followed through my career in marketing and worked in financial services. I did that for 17 years in Melbourne and then I was posted to Wall Street in New York. I was there at the time of the global financial crisis at the end of 2008.

I returned back to Melbourne and I decided to buy some land but I didn’t decide that I wanted to be a farmer per se. I just wanted to have a little piece of the earth, maybe 5ac.

But I ended up buying a 200ac farm five years ago, which ended up changing the strategy to having a big farm which needs a lot more work.

It’s undulating land and I’ve got good rainfall. When I bought it, there were three large paddocks and I decided that, as a female farmer, I needed an animal that I could handle so I went into sheep.

I spent the first year turning the large paddocks into smaller ones and running gravity-fed water lines and troughs through the paddocks so that I could protect the pasture. My sheep are all grass-fed.

I started with 40 ewes and a stud ram.

I was only 85km out of Melbourne so I was still working in the city and farming at the weekends.

I run the Australian White sheep breed.

It’s a relatively new breed and it’s a composite breed. It’s a shedding sheep and it’s bright white in the paddock.

They also yield good meat and have a Wagyu-style marbling presentation through the meat. My hook weight is closer to 24kg than 20kg too – I like a heavier carcase.

My first year selling the sheep was four years ago and I sold 16 lambs through friends of mine. The next year, I sold 30 and this year, my fourth year, I sold 450 lambs.

I was able to grow quickly because of my consumer branding background. I was doing direct mail-outs and farmer markets and so forth, so I was able to expand quite rapidly.

I now partner with my neighbour, who is a big farmer – he has 300 ewes and I have 200.

It means that I have more product to sell too and he gets a premium price for the product.

I was responsible for processing and selling the whole carcase, but I was left with lamb bellies/flaps. I had no use for them and they were just going to feed the neighbour’s farm dogs.

So about 18 months ago, I was hosting a food and wine event on my farm and I asked one of the chefs there if you could make bacon from lamb. He had never done it but was willing to give it a go. I gave him my lamb belly to trial with.

He came back a few days later and we tasted it and the lamb bacon was better than pig bacon.

So, 5kg of bellies first turned into 10kg and then 50kg before reaching 150kg. I’ve turned a very low-value part of the carcase into a very high-value cut. I sell the cut now at AU$100/kg.

I partnered with a distributor in Australia five weeks ago and within two weeks the lamb bacon was in 65 stores across the country. I’m aiming to get to 1t/week of lamb bacon.

I quit my job 18 months ago to do this full-time with a product that no one heard of. I have learned there are people who don’t eat pork bacon for religious, health and ethical reasons, so they’re looking for an alternative.

The product is called lamb rashers in the more Muslim regions and the next stop is a global distribution. It’s a very exciting time.

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