The Kennedy household is a typical family farm, with children's colouring pencils and papers sprawled across the table, but what you wouldn't expect to see there are extremely large binders.
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The binders document the number of orders Kennedy Farm Produce in Burramboot has received in the past few months after gaining traction from Facebook.
Originally from NSW, business owner Emma Kennedy studied social work at university where she met her husband Shaun.
Mrs Kennedy's career path took a different direction when her social work employers in Echuca offered her a redundancy.
“I guess that started a situation of being uncertain, so Shaun and I started talking about what we might be able to do to add value to the farm,” she said.
“Rather than creating more work for ourselves we thought we'd look at what we could package up in a way that people would be interested to buy.”
This sparked an individual idea; the Kennedys began to sell microwavable popcorn on the cob and business began to boom.
At the start of 2018, Mrs Kennedy visited several restaurants with samples of their products.
The task was time consuming and at times disheartening but now her products are sold at a multitude of venues which stay true to the values of fresh, seasonal products.
Mrs Kennedy is a jack-of-all-trades as she runs the social media accounts, takes media inquiries, processes special requests, and packs and delivers products from their property, between Colbinabbin and Corop.
With these jobs on her plate, she still manages to cook meals for workers during harvest time and raise two energetic children, Lily, 5 and Indi, 3.
The family possesses a passion for agriculture and Mrs Kennedy has had to re-evaluate and adapt the way their business farms.
“The cost of water is so high that it's affecting what and how we grow."
The Kennedys usually plant a number of corn crops each year but have had to cut back due to lack of revenue.
“Normally in the summer we have a lot of corn crops around our farm, now we only have the one to produce the Kennedy Farm Produce popcorn,” Mrs Kennedy said.
“It doesn't make business sense to grow that crop, because we wouldn't make money from it.”
Despite the challenges she faces, Mrs Kennedy always focuses on plans for the future, such as adding a FAQ page to the website and developing caramel popcorn.
To see where Kennedy Farm Produce is sold, visit: https://kennedyfarmproduce.com.au/
